Data center owners now want their buildings in 12 to 18 months, down from the two years or more they used to accept, a procurement executive at one of the country’s larger electrical contractors told a National Electrical Contractors Association seminar this week. Jon Miller, vice president of procurement at ArchKey Solutions, put the number of U.S. data centers under construction at about 400.
EC&M reported on the session on Oct. 7. Miller shared the panel with two Graybar executives: Mike Carroll, vice president of construction, and Rich King, who runs the distributor’s commdata and data center business. The 400 figure is Miller’s, and the report doesn’t say where it comes from.
Data center electrical contractors have a logistics problem, not just a lead-time problem
Everyone knows switchgear is late. The panel’s point was that the list has grown: wire, cable and circuit breakers are now hard to get too.
And getting the material is only half of it. Campuses routinely top 1 GW and sit in rural counties a long drive from the nearest distributor branch. King described one job that called for 20 truckloads of cable tray. Delivered at once, he said, it would have swamped both the site and the closest warehouse. So it had to be staged and released by phase.
Twenty truckloads of one commodity. On one job.
What electrical contractors want from distributors on a 12-month schedule
Miller boiled his expectations down to “transparency, accountability and being present.” He allowed that data center jobs are unpredictable. His complaint is about being surprised.
The services the Graybar executives described are less about product than about hours:
- Preassemblies built off site.
- Distributor staff on the job handling material so electricians don’t.
- Kitting, RF tagging and color-coded pallets so a crew can find what it’s installing.
That is labor, sold by a supply house. It moves work from the gang box to a warehouse where the people doing it don’t need a journeyman’s card. What it costs, and who carries it when the schedule moves, the report doesn’t say. Contractors signing up for it should know before the first truck rolls.
Electrical contractor revenue shows the same concentration
The panel’s picture matches the trade’s own numbers. EC&M’s Top 50 Electrical Contractors report, published Sept. 15, put the group’s combined 2025 revenue at $80.4 billion, up 35% from $59.5 billion a year earlier. Ninety-one percent of responding firms named data centers as their leading market. Eighty-three percent reported labor shortages, and nearly 60% said their prefabrication and modular work had grown significantly.
It lines up with what general contractors report. In August, one in six ABC contractors was working on a data center, and they held far more backlog than the rest.
The same survey has the warning in it. Three-quarters of the Top 50 respondents said permitting delays and regulatory scrutiny of data centers had touched their business, a risk builders say they can schedule around. A subcontractor with a third of its revenue in one building type has less room to be relaxed about that than a diversified GC does.
ArchKey, for its part, is still buying. On Oct. 1 it acquired US Communications & Electric, a Cleveland low-voltage contractor with more than 130 employees.
King sees edge data centers, smaller facilities near hospitals, universities and financial firms, as the next wave, and says it’s “coming faster than we think.” That’s a distributor’s forecast. The schedule compression is already here, and it’s running into gear that was late on a two-year job.