In July, U.S. data center construction was running at about $75.2 billion a year, up 57% from a year earlier, according to preliminary Census Bureau figures.
It is now carrying the rest of the commercial market. “The increase in nonresidential construction spending that occurred in July was entirely due to data centers,” said Anirban Basu, chief economist at Associated Builders and Contractors. Without data centers, he noted, nonresidential spending fell for the second month in a row, to its lowest level since September 2023.
If you don’t build data centers, it’s easy to treat this as someone else’s story. It isn’t. Those projects need electricians, equipment operators, superintendents and project managers, and they hire from the same pool you do.
What contractors are reporting
The Associated General Contractors of America and NCCER surveyed 1,830 contractors this summer and published the results on September 3. Twenty-eight percent had worked on a data center project in the past year. Among the firms that reported on how that work affected them:
- 58% said data center projects increased competition for skilled workers.
- 49% reported increased wage pressure.
And across the whole survey, 42% said shortages of their own workers or their subcontractors’ workers had delayed projects.
Where it’s hitting hardest
Georgia. For the first time, metro Atlanta passed Northern Virginia as the top market in North America for data center construction. It has 2,882 megawatts of capacity under construction, up 52% in a year (CBRE, August 2026). The hiring pace behind that is hard to picture. “Just this year, we have netted over 500 employees,” Mindy Bates, human resources director at Valdosta-based Ace Electric, told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “In construction, you don’t hire 500. You bring in about 700.”
Texas. Texas has some of the clearest examples of the squeeze spreading to everyone else. Scotty Wristen, owner of WE Electric in Abilene, told the Texas Tribune he lost five workers to the data centers. He can pay $20 an hour; the data center jobs pay $35 an hour, plus overtime and per diem. Homebuilders feel it too. “It’s taken us two months longer to build the houses than what it did before the data centers were coming in,” said Abilene home builder Gene Lantrip.
Virginia. Northern Virginia already has about 4,500 megawatts of data center capacity in operation, and another 2,420 megawatts under construction (CBRE, August 2026). Across the major markets, CBRE says about 80% of the capacity under construction is already committed to a tenant. That’s demand for skilled trades that isn’t going away soon.
The real bottleneck is in your office
When the field gets tight, you can usually find a crew if you’re willing to pay. It’s much harder to replace an experienced payroll administrator or project accountant, someone who knows your jobs, your union agreements and your GCs.
And a tight labor market makes more work for the office, not less. Look at Ace Electric’s numbers again: to grow by 500 people, they brought in about 700. Every one of those hires means paperwork: onboarding, classifications, certified payroll, union reporting, and all over again when someone leaves. Higher wages and more turnover in the field become more hours in the office.
The last thing you want is your best office people spending those hours re-typing timecards and rebuilding the same reports every week.
What a Digital Assistant takes off their plate
A Digital Assistant works alongside your office staff. It takes on the tedious, repetitive parts of the work: gathering the data, checking it, and putting it in the right format. Then it hands the results to your people to review, approve and finalize. It’s the kind of technology you may have heard called “agentic AI.” The result is a back office that gets more done in less time, with your people in charge. For contractors feeling the squeeze, the best places to start are the tasks that repeat every week:
- Certified payroll. It gathers time and payroll data, checks each worker’s classification and rate, and drafts the WH-347 for your review.
- Union reporting. It drafts dues, benefit fund contributions and hours by local the same way every week, ready for your sign-off.
- The weekly status report. It pulls the numbers from the systems you already use, so your team isn’t rebuilding a spreadsheet by hand.
Your team reviews and approves everything before it goes out. The Digital Assistant does the legwork; your people make the calls.
Three questions to ask your own office
- If your payroll administrator left tomorrow, who would file next week’s certified payroll?
- How many hours a week does your office spend typing the same numbers into a second system?
- When you add ten people in the field, how much more work lands in the office, and who absorbs it?
If those answers make you uneasy, you don’t have to build a data center to feel the squeeze. You’re already feeling it.
Ready to talk?
Start with a 15-minute conversation. We’ll ask how your office runs today and where the hours go, then tell you honestly whether a Digital Assistant would help. There’s no pitch. You’ll find the contact link at the top of every page.
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Monthly Construction Spending, July 2026 (preliminary; released Sept. 1, 2026). Associated Builders and Contractors news release, Sept. 1, 2026. AGC and NCCER, 2026 Workforce Survey, Sept. 3, 2026. CBRE, North America Data Center Trends H1 2026, Aug. 27, 2026. Zachary Hansen, “Data centers dominate Georgia construction, creating new labor pressures,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sept. 11, 2026. Sneha Dey, Texas Tribune, Apr. 28, 2026.