Data centers now run the rankings. ENR’s 2026 Top 400 Contractors list shows combined revenue rose 11.8% to $671.4 billion in 2025, and the firms doing the talking all pointed at the same thing: server halls, the substations that feed them, and the campuses going up around them.
The telecom category, where most contractors book hyperscale data center work, grew more than 86% year over year and cleared $100 billion on its own. That single segment did most of the heavy lifting behind the overall number.
Where the contractor revenue actually went
Growth stayed bunched at the top. The ten largest firms captured 23.3% of all Top 400 revenue, and the top 100 took 73.4%, so the back half of the list is splitting a much thinner slice. Turner Construction held first for the sixth straight year. Bechtel kept second. STO Building Group climbed to third from sixth, pushing Kiewit down to fourth.
That reshuffle says something about which work paid in 2025. Firms with the balance sheet and the trade relationships to chase nine-figure data center jobs moved up. Firms weighted toward slower markets, commercial offices, some public buildings, mostly held flat.
The risk hiding inside the contractor revenue surge
A 12% jump reads like a healthy industry. It’s really one demand source carrying a lot of weight. Contractors told ENR the AI build-out is the opportunity of the decade, citing the roughly $7 trillion cloud providers are expected to spend bringing AI capacity online. The flip side: a list this concentrated rises and falls with a handful of clients’ capital budgets.
Power is the other catch. Several of the biggest backlogs depend on grid capacity that isn’t built yet, and interconnection queues keep slipping. A contractor can have the data center designed and the crew staffed and still wait on a utility. We’ve covered how a Minnesota judge halted Google’s Project Skyway data center over an environmental review, the kind of snag that doesn’t show up in a revenue table until the next one.
For now the money is real and the order books are full. The question for 2026 is whether anything besides AI shows up to share the load. If it doesn’t, next year’s list tells the same story with higher stakes.