For fifteen years the answer to “what’s stopping you from prefabricating more” was labor. A survey released on August 28 says it’s now square footage.
The 2026 State of MEP Report from software vendor Stratus reports that 68% of surveyed fabrication-heavy MEP contractors name shop space as their top constraint on scaling prefabrication, ranked ahead of skilled labor. Read that number with the caveat it deserves: this is a vendor-commissioned survey, released alongside two new product features, and it discloses no sample size, sampling method or margin of error. Every percentage here is Stratus’s, not the industry’s.
What the survey claims
Among the reported findings: 88% of data center MEP work now involves fabrication in some form, the highest rate of any project type surveyed. 82% of firms expect their revenue share from data centers to rise over the next two years. 82% have recently added shop space or plan to within two years. 68% already perform modular multi-trade work, meaning racks, skids and corridor assemblies rather than single-trade spools. And 77% now rate real-time production visibility as very important or critical.
Stratus CEO Jake Olsen framed it as “the differentiator is no longer simply who has the most people, it’s who has the best system,” which is exactly what a production-tracking software company would say. Jason Steele, a senior VDC manager at mechanical contractor Cerris Systems, is quoted in the release saying clients are pushing his teams “to build faster than we’ve ever built before.” That’s a vendor-supplied customer testimonial.
The part you can verify
Skip the percentages and look at the capital spending, which is a matter of public record. Southland Industries consolidated its piping, plumbing, sheet metal and electrical fabrication into a 390,000-square-foot Fort Worth shop. DPR Construction opened a 113,702-square-foot Silicon Valley facility with 45,542 square feet dedicated to prefabrication.
Those are real buildings with real leases, and they are the argument the survey is trying to make. Contractors chasing mission-critical work concluded that they could not scale multi-trade assembly out of a leased bay behind the yard, and they went and bought industrial real estate. That’s a heavier commitment than a hiring plan and a harder one to reverse.
Which is the actual risk. Shop capacity is fixed cost. If data center demand normalizes on the schedule some forecasters expect, a lot of mechanical contractors will be carrying 300,000 square feet of Fort Worth against a book that no longer needs it.
Related on Exchange: the McGhee Tyson terminal program.
Sources: Stratus press release, August 28, 2026; DPR Construction.