The AI data center buildout could absorb $5 trillion to $6.5 trillion through 2030, by Bain & Company’s count, and one of the report’s own authors isn’t sure the revenue will show up to pay for it. His advice to builders: before counting a project as backlog, ask four questions about it.
Peter Hanbury, a Bain partner and co-author of the data center chapter of the firm’s 2026 Technology Report, laid them out in an interview Construction Dive published Oct. 8. Is the power real? Are the customer and the financing real? Is the permission to build real? And is the design stable enough to build?
None of them is about concrete or steel.
The numbers behind the AI data center buildout
Bain’s base case adds nearly 150 GW of compute capacity by 2030, taking installed data center IT power from 79 GW last year to 228 GW. It describes hyperscalers planning campuses of 5 GW or more at $150 billion to $200 billion apiece. Five years ago, the report notes, 50 MW was a large project.
To justify that, the firm figures the AI market has to approach $6 trillion in annual revenue by 2031. Existing consumer and enterprise applications get it to somewhere between $1.2 trillion and $1.8 trillion. The rest has to come from products that mostly don’t exist yet.
Hanbury called the spending plausible. He told Construction Dive the five largest hyperscalers could put roughly $780 billion into capital expenditures this year, nearly five times what they spent three years ago, though not all of it goes to data centers. His line on the pipeline was blunter: “Not every announced gigawatt will make sense.”
Where data center construction schedules actually break
Bain puts a 1 GW build at one to four years on a site that already has power. New grid capacity takes four years or more. So the building is rarely the long pole, and the slowest constrained input sets the schedule for the whole program.
For contractors, Hanbury named electrical labor as the sharpest constraint, particularly high-voltage, substation and mission-critical crews. Mechanical and pipefitting trades come next as liquid cooling scales, along with controls and commissioning. That squares with what electrical contractors heard at NECA about 12- to 18-month schedules last week.
His prescription is to stop running projects one at a time and run programs: site and power planned together, procurement earlier, more prefabrication, modular designs, and trade partners signed for a portfolio instead of a job. Contractors are also being pulled into substations, transmission, interconnection and onsite generation as part of the same work.
Permission to build is now a schedule item
The third question is the newest. Bain counts at least 75 projects worth $130 billion blocked or delayed by local opposition in the first quarter of 2026, nearly matching the $156 billion disrupted in all of 2025.
Builders have said the backlash doesn’t touch the build schedule. Bain’s numbers say it touches whether there is a schedule. The report’s own example is a CoreWeave project in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, where a binding agreement caps water use and sets noise, emissions and local hiring terms.
A consultant’s forecast isn’t a pipeline, and Bain sells advice to the companies doing the spending. But the four questions cost nothing to ask. A general contractor carrying $2 billion of announced data center work should know how much of it has a signed interconnection, a funded customer, a permit and a frozen design.
That number is the real backlog.