Billions in Data Center Work Dwarfs Project Activity in Other Construction Verticals

In Electrical Marketing’s database of large construction projects contracts that entered the planning stages in 2Q 2024 are 29 trophy jobs valued at more than $1 billion. Fourteen of the projects in the table on page 2 were data centers and 13 were hospitals.
The billion-dollar Norfolk International Airport in Norfolk, VA, that got started this month and the $1.2 billion Hollywood Burbank Airport that broke ground in Feb. 2024 were two other large projects in the always-active airport category.
We were also impressed with the size of several colossal renewable projects now underway, including the $11-billion 3.5-gigawatt (GW) Sun Zia wind farm with more than 900 turbines in New Mexico that will supply power to Phoenix and Southern California; the $5-billion, 3,500MW Chokecherry and Sierra Madre Wind Energy Project with approximately 600 wind turbines the Power Company of Wyoming is now building; and the $861-million South Brooklyn Marine Terminal that broke ground this month and will serve as a logistics hub for Equinor’s  810MW offshore wind farm being built off the Long Island, NY, coast. 
But it’s the amount of data center construction right now that really amazed EM’s editors. These facilities are loaded with electrical equipment, as well as backup power systems and huge amounts of VDV equipment. According to a post at www.dgtlinfra.com, the electrical systems in data centers account for 40% to 45% of a project’s total development costs. On a square footage basis, www.dgtlinfra.com says electrical systems can cost between $280 per sq ft to $460 per sq ft.
Tech giants Meta (Facebook), Google, Amazon Web Services and Microsoft are currently responsible for most of the construction activity. The capex budgets these companies are devoting to data centers must be astounding. One report at www.datacenterdynamics.com said Meta’s capital expenditures this year could hit $40 billion and that a big chunk of this spend is expected to be on data centers.
Another report at datacenteredynamics.com said Microsoft and OpenAI may build a $100 billion supercomputer campus called Stargate to help develop artificial intelligence models that would need up to 5GW of power.
EM editors also logged more than $10 billion in hospital spending led by the $3.7-billion UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, CA,  and three billion-dollar projects (see table below).