During the past two years, the construction industry has added an average of 20,000 new workers each month. In November, the White House reported that employment in the sector has exceeded the pre-Great Recession high for the first time, with October 2023 setting a record monthly high since the start of collected data way back in 1939. AI is only adding to this trajectory. Bob Berlinsky and Beth Lowry discuss this unprecedented growth and the importance of collaborative partnerships in building a future that meets these demands.
Do you remember the famous quote: “If you build it, they will come”?
With data center construction, customers are already coming before facilities are built. Red-hot demand has been exacerbated by hyperscale computing demands. According to Synergy Research Group, public cloud providers spent 120 billion USD on building, leasing, and equipping data center infrastructure in 2022—up 13 percent from the previous year—and hyperscalers Microsoft, Google, and AWS collectively raised their overall data center capacity by 18 percent.
The surge of AI has only added explosive growth and demand. Holder has been building data centers for more than two decades and is consistently the top data center builder in the country—but it hasn’t seen anything like this before. The builds are not only more frequent, but also larger and more complex—between 40MW–80MW per campus.
Great growth also comes with great responsibility to build strong industry relationships between data center providers and construction partners. This collaboration allows for our collective industry to construct facilities that not only serve today’s customer demands, but also are state-of-the-art, sustainable buildings that create positive contributions to local communities.
A Foundation of Trust
As requirements and demands for density and energy efficiency increase, it’s more important than ever that all team members are aligned. Increasing tenant density demands affects the entire project plan, schedule, and supply chain. Historically, however, data center construction operated with a standard degree of collaboration between provider and builder. In the traditional delivery method, owners and contractors didn’t engage until the sales, financing, and design phases of a project were mostly completed.
But demands have accelerated customers time-to-market requirements, which renders the traditional method inefficient in terms of both time and costs. When a data center provider and a construction company engage as partners at the beginning of a new data center customer cycle, it allows a builder like Holder to leverage their expertise in preconstruction, budgeting, project planning, and design review. It also allows for both companies to get started concurrently on essential planning activities, like long-lead equipment purchasing, project permitting, team resource planning, and site logistic planning. All of these advanced planning initiatives allow the team to hit the ground running once the project is approved.
