Data center construction spending is running at a pace the industry has never seen. Year-to-date starts hit $58.1 billion through May 2026, more than four times the record set over the same stretch a year earlier, according to ConstructConnect’s July data center report. May alone added $7.9 billion, the eighth-highest month on record. Whatever else is happening in construction, this one segment is on a tear.
And it’s carrying a lot of weight. Data center starts have accounted for more than a fifth of all nonresidential building starts over the past 12 months. Strip them out and the broader picture looks a lot softer.
Where the data center construction spending is landing
The money is concentrated. Over the trailing year, five states, Virginia, Texas, Louisiana, Illinois and North Carolina, captured close to 60% of all new data center starts spending. Activity thickens from Texas eastward and up the coast to Virginia, with a real chunk in former Rust Belt states across the Midwest. New England and the entire western US, by contrast, drew just 6%.
Costs stay high. After trimming the priciest and cheapest 10% of projects, ConstructConnect put the 2026 median at $473 per square foot and the average at $784, a gap that tells you plenty of facilities are still landing well above $1,000 a foot. These aren’t warehouses with servers. They’re dense, power-hungry, mechanically heavy buildings.
The pipeline says the boom isn’t done
The forward book is just as loud. ConstructConnect is tracking close to 100 data center projects in preconstruction with start dates before year-end, together worth more than $101 billion in planned spending. That figure doesn’t even include Project Kestrel, a single $100 billion development the firm follows on its own because of its size. Preconstruction isn’t a guarantee, and some of these will slip or die. But the volume signals momentum through the rest of 2026.
Chief Economist Michael Guckes, who prepared the report, points to the pull-through effect on power. Data centers are enormous electricity consumers, and power infrastructure starts are forecast to finish 2026 up nearly 31% over 2025. One boom is dragging another behind it.
The risk hiding in the concentration
Here’s the uncomfortable part. When a single sector props up a fifth of nonresidential starts, the whole market inherits its risks. A pullback in AI capital spending, a financing squeeze or a wave of local permit fights, and the drop wouldn’t stay contained to data centers. Several states are already moving to slow approvals. Contractors riding this wave are booking real backlog, and the firms staffing up for it know the exposure. The smart ones are also asking what their business looks like if the $58 billion pace doesn’t hold, a tension we follow in our coverage of builds like the Meta Sturgeon County AI data center. As ConstructConnect lays out, the near-term numbers point up. The concentration is the thing to watch.