One building type is now carrying US construction. Data center construction spending crossed $50 billion year-to-date in 2026, according to Census Bureau figures, up from $13.6 billion in the same stretch a year earlier. That’s not growth. That’s a category roughly quadrupling while most of the market sits still.
What the data center spending numbers show
The milestone has a few firsts attached. Private data center outlays passed public spending on transportation structures, roads, bridges, transit, for the first time. Data centers now account for about 2.3% of all construction spending in the country. Pull them out of the math and nonresidential building spending would drop an estimated 3.8% this year instead of holding flat.
So the headline isn’t really that data centers are booming. It’s that almost nothing else is.
The cost curve nobody’s bragging about
Building these things keeps getting more expensive. The average data center now runs about $475 million over the trailing year, up from roughly $178 million a year earlier, as projects scale toward hyperscale AI campuses. Cost per square foot climbed to around $746 in 2026, a 45% jump over the 2025 average. Some of that is sheer size. A lot of it is the power and cooling fit-out, where the real money in an AI facility lives, well beyond the shell. The demand is driven by AI training loads and cloud growth, the same wave feeding mega-campuses like the data center work that pushed ENR’s Top 400 to $671 billion.
What a one-sector boom means for builders
For contractors with data center experience, the pipeline looks great. For everyone else, the report is a warning. When a single, cyclical category props up an entire market, the market is more fragile than the topline suggests. AI capital spending bends, and a lot of nonresidential construction bends with it.
The number to watch isn’t $50 billion. It’s what’s left standing if that figure stops climbing.