The headline says nonresidential building grows 8.7 percent this year, an upgrade of more than five percentage points. Take out one line and the picture inverts.
ConstructConnect’s autumn forecast, produced with Oxford Economics, puts a $78 billion increase in commercial construction on the books, of which $77.4 billion is data centers. The firm says so plainly: without data centers, commercial construction would show virtually no growth.
The segment splits
Private offices, the category that contains data centers, are forecast up 83.1 percent. Institutional is up 7.4 percent, carried by prisons, courthouses and military work. Civil is up 3.6 percent and power up 7.8 percent.
Manufacturing goes the other way, down 43 percent, which is the unwinding of the fab and battery-plant announcement wave. Residential starts fall 10.5 percent, single-family down 5.9 percent, with new single-family permits at 462,000 in the first half, a three-year low. Total starts across everything land at plus 2.1 percent.
One number that isn’t a forecast
Starts through June were up 6.5 percent year over year. That is measured activity, and ConstructConnect sets it deliberately against the 2.1 percent full-year projection, which implies a considerably weaker second half than the first. Everything else here is forecast and labelled as such, and it is a commercial product from a firm that sells five-year starts data. The baseline also now assumes the Fed’s next cut arrives in September 2027, moved back from December 2026, with GDP at 2.3 percent.
Concentration is the risk
A contractor with a data center or power position is looking at a very different 2026 from the one the headline number describes. Everyone else is looking at flat commercial, manufacturing down 43 percent and residential down 10.5 percent, and the aggregate is being held up by an asset class most firms have no route into.
That asymmetry is already visible in what’s actually getting built. Power infrastructure sized for that demand, like the 3,000 MW HVDC link at SunZia, is moving. Affordable housing that pencils, like Willets Point Commons, mostly moves on public subsidy rather than market economics. The middle of the market is where the 2.1 percent lives.
Source: ConstructConnect.