Four years ago T5 Construction did $87 million of work, most of it for its own parent. Last year it did $1.7 billion, and 83% of it was for somebody else.
That ratio is why, effective September 1, the Atlanta-based builder separated from parent T5 Data Centers and relaunched as an independent data center general contractor called EverOn Data Center Services. The split follows a January 2026 restructuring that divided T5 Data Centers into T5 Properties and T5 Services. At the same time, data center lifecycle services firm Salute agreed to acquire T5 Operations, the other half of T5 Services. Terms weren’t disclosed.
The number that made the case
An in-house builder that does 17% of its volume in-house isn’t really an in-house builder. It’s a merchant contractor with an awkward ownership structure, and the awkwardness costs it work: competitors’ owners are reluctant to hand drawings to a subsidiary of a company they compete with for sites and power.
The growth figures are company-supplied and haven’t been independently audited. The closest external check is ENR’s own Top 400 Contractors filing, where the firm debuted this year at No. 80 with $1.67 billion in 2025 construction revenue, filed under ENR’s telecommunications market category. That corroborates the scale even if the four-year trajectory rests on the company’s word. The portfolio claim, more than 260 completed projects and more than 12 million square feet of data center space, is also the company’s own.
What it means for subs and owners
Tom Mertz, previously president and chief operating officer of T5 Services, is EverOn’s president and CEO. The company says existing contracts and customer relationships carry over unchanged, which is the first thing anyone with open work on a T5 job should confirm in writing anyway.
The more interesting downstream effect is acquisitive. EverOn says independence gives it room to pursue acquisitions and geographic expansion, and the scarce resource in mission-critical construction isn’t general contracting capacity. It’s electrical and mechanical subcontractor capacity with switchgear, controls and commissioning experience. A newly independent $1.7 billion GC with a growth mandate is a plausible buyer for regional electrical and mechanical firms, which is worth knowing if you own one.
The market underneath the transaction
Standing up a merchant data center GC at this scale only makes sense if third-party demand holds, and current market data says it’s holding hard. Capacity under construction across North America’s primary markets hit a record in the first half of 2026 while vacancy fell to 1.4%, and more than 80% of what’s being built is already preleased. Backlog in this segment is contracted, not speculative.
A firm that grew nineteen-fold in four years inside one customer’s pipeline is now betting it can keep growing outside it. The Top 400 debut says the volume is real. The next two years say whether the relationships were T5’s or Mertz’s.
More on the demand side in our coverage of CBRE’s H1 2026 data center report and JLL’s midyear pipeline numbers.
Sources: ENR and the Salute release.