Data Center Starts Hit $81.5B in Six Months as Costs Per Foot Jump

United States data center construction starts totaled $22.3 billion in June 2026, the second-highest month on record, and $81.5 billion across the first half of the year, according to ConstructConnect's August 2026 data center report. The six-month figure already exceeds the $72.5 billion started across all of 2025 and runs more than three times the full-year 2024 total. January 2026 still holds the monthly record at $25.5 billion.

Twenty-three projects broke ground in June, bringing year-to-date starts to 116. The average data center entering construction in the second quarter measured close to 700,000 square feet, more than double the average size in 2022. The buildings are not just more numerous. They are individually larger, denser, and carrying more electrical load per square foot than the generation of halls built before the AI training buildout.

Federal spending data shows the same divergence. The Census Bureau, which now publishes data centers as a standalone line inside private office construction, put data center spending at a $50.7 billion seasonally adjusted annual rate in April 2026, up 27 percent from $39.8 billion a year earlier. Over the same stretch, total private nonresidential construction spending fell to a $738.7 billion annual rate in May 2026 from $791.0 billion in May 2025. One category is climbing while the broader commercial market contracts.

Cost per square foot is climbing with it. ConstructConnect puts the 2026 year-to-date median at $570 per square foot against $415 in 2025, a 38 percent increase, with the average moving from $514 to $859, up 67 percent. Over five years the median has compounded at 17 percent a year and the average at 22 percent. Structure and shell costs do not move that fast. The escalation sits in the power train: medium-voltage switchgear, transformers, busway, UPS systems, generators, and the labor to land and terminate all of it.

The geography has moved as well. North Carolina, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan each logged more than $10 billion in starts through June, with Virginia and Texas close behind. For the back half of 2026, the pipeline leads with Texas, North Carolina, Virginia, Arkansas, and Utah, followed by Georgia, Oklahoma, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. ConstructConnect counts 85 projects in late-stage preconstruction carrying $78.2 billion in planned value, a figure that excludes the largest single announcement of the year.

That announcement came on July 29, when the Department of Energy named Brookfield and NextEra Energy as partners on a campus at the DOE's Paducah Site in western Kentucky, alongside Big Rivers Electric Corporation, Jackson Purchase Energy Cooperative, and Paducah Power System. The partnership covers more than $100 billion in private investment: 1.8 gigawatts of AI and high-performance computing load, 2 gigawatts of new natural gas-fired generation, and up to 2.6 gigawatts of battery energy storage, with completion expected in 2031. DOE puts construction employment at roughly 8,000 and permanent operating positions at about 600.

That ratio is the shape of the work. A campus like Paducah is not a data hall job with a utility feed. It is a generating station, a battery plant, a substation and switchyard program, and a computing load, all inside one fence and all requiring licensed commercial electricians. The scope runs to medium-voltage cable pulls and terminations, gas turbine and balance-of-plant power and controls, battery container interconnection, grounding grids, and the transmission upgrades DOE cited as part of the package. None of it resembles residential work, and little of it resembles a conventional office fit-out.

The labor math has not caught up. The Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 821,000 electricians in 2025 at a median wage of $63,190, or $30.38 an hour, and projects 9 percent growth through 2035 with about 72,700 openings a year, most from retirements and departures rather than new positions. The national median is a poor guide to what these campuses pay. The premium is in the states absorbing new load, and it shows up in per diem, sustained overtime, and shift differentials rather than in base scale.

It also shows up where the bench is thinnest. Virginia and Texas have a decade of data center manpower behind them. Arkansas, Utah, Oklahoma, and western Kentucky do not. When an $80 billion pipeline lands in markets without a deep pool of commercially licensed hands, contractors staff it with travelers, and local apprenticeship pipelines run several years behind the schedule the developer signed. That gap is the hiring story for the next 24 months.

For contractors, the 85 projects sitting in late-stage preconstruction are the actionable number. Manpower calls, gear procurement, and prequalification happen before groundbreaking, not after, and the $78.2 billion in that column is what determines crew demand into 2027. For working electricians, the practical read is that the jobs are moving inland and the scope is moving upstream, toward generation, storage, and substation work.

Data centers now consume more construction capital than the offices they are counted with. The electrical trade is where that capital lands.