An Estimated $39 Billion in New Data Center & Hospital Projects Hits Market in Q3 2024

Although total construction spending is only showing a mild YOY increase through August of +4.1% to $2,133.9 billion, some pockets of the construction market including semiconductor and EV plants, data centers and hospitals are growing at many times that rate and have been blessed with some glitzy, mega-billion-dollar projects.
Electrical Marketing’s editors found no less than 17 projects with a total contract value of $1 billion or more that hit the drawing boards or broke ground in 3Q 2024. When you estimate that electrical work typically accounts for 10% of a project’s total contract value, that means there’s some serious new work underway or coming online soon.
According the latest construction spending data from the U.S. Census Bureau, its Computer/Electronic/Electrical  (up +23.6% YOY to $133,311 million) and  Data Center (up 56.9% YOY to $28,565 million) project categories had some the best YOY growth, and the Transportation Equipment (up 35.9% to $14,711 million) and Hospital (up +13.3% to  $27,115 million categories) were also strong. Many of the mega-projects EM’s editors logged into Electrical Marketing’s database during 3Q 2024 were in these categories (see chart below).
We found 14 data centers with a combined total contract value of roughly $24.2 billion and 12 hospital jobs with a total contract value of approximately $15 billion that either broke ground or hit the drawing boards during Q3 2024.
The two biggest data center projects in our Top 50 for Q3 2024 were Amazon Web Services’ $11-billion data center campus that broke ground this month in New Carlisle, IN, and a $4.8-billion
 dollar, 16-building project that was recently proposed by a “cloud and e-commerce company” according to a post at www.datacenterdynamics.com.
Two humongous hospital projects are also now underway. In Dallas, TX, the $5-billion Children’s Health and UT Southwestern Medical Center will have 552 beds and include 4.5 million sq ft of construction in two 12-story towers and in an eight-story tower that will replace the existing Children’s Medical Center. The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia has $3-billion worth of construction underway, a 1.3-million-sq-ft patient tower and the 17-story Morgan Center for Research and Innovation.
There were plenty of other large projects of note. Although the offshore wind market has been recently bruised by disputes over costs and some malfunctioning turbine blades, advocates are proud of the $861-million South Brooklyn Marine Terminal wind farm logistics hub for Equinor's 810MW Empire Wind offshore project that broke ground in June.
In an interesting building retrofit, Northeastern University’s $500-million Rioux Institute that broke ground in Sept. 2024 in Portland, ME, will repurpose an old baked beans plant with killer views of Casco Bay.
We also thought the 425MW solar farm and data center that will be built at Naval Air Station Lemoore in Lemoore, CA, south of Fresno, CA, was an interesting project because it exemplifies the growing trend of data centers being built with or near their own independent sources of power.