Measuring the Data Center Construction Boom: Real Estate, Infrastructure, and IT Components

Spending on the data center buildout is quoted in several different ways and often measures different inputs. This page helps us separate and understand what the numbers mean and how much impact the buildout actually has on the U.S. construction industry as well as the overall national economy and market.

Decoding Data Center Spending Metrics

• Budgeted is global capital expenditure, booked when paid. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft guided to roughly $720–745 billion for 2026 on their July earnings calls, and chips and servers are roughly 60% or more of it.[1]
• Started is the value of projects breaking ground: $84 billion in the first seven months of 2026, $144 billion annualized, against $29 billion for all of 2025.[2]
• Built is what the Census Bureau counts as construction put in place: on-site work on the buildings themselves, no chips and no land. It was $37 billion in the first seven months of 2026, $64 billion annualized; the July seasonally adjusted annual rate was $75 billion.[3]
• Annualized figures on this page are January to July 2026 totals multiplied by 12/7, not the seasonally adjusted annual rate for a single month. The two differ when the pace changes within the year: for data center construction the pro rata figure is $64 billion and the July rate is $75 billion.

Construction Is a Small and Shrinking Share of Capex

• Four-company capex rose from $99 billion in 2020 to $411 billion in 2025, and the companies have guided to about $732 billion for 2026.[4]
• U.S. data center construction put in place rose from $9 billion to $50 billion over the same period, and is running at about $64 billion annualized in 2026.[3]
• Construction was 8–9% of capex in 2020–2022, peaked at 15% in 2024 as the building wave started, and is falling back toward 9% as chip purchases outrun construction.
• Data center construction put in place and hyperscaler capex come from different sources (U.S. Census and company reports, respectively) and measure different but related things. The comparison is meant to be instructive rather than definitive.

Where the Money Goes

• The building side of a 1 GW AI campus (land, shell, power and cooling infrastructure, fit-out, soft costs) runs about $20 billion at the upper end of Cushman & Wakefield’s 2026 range, which excludes chips and GPUs.[5]
• The chips and servers inside add roughly $30 billion more: hardware is about 60% of the all-in total in McKinsey’s framework and in the hyperscalers’ own descriptions of their spending.[6]
• Power infrastructure is the largest single building line (21% of the building side); land is the smallest (7%).
• Apart from land, the gray bars are what Census counts as construction. The red bar never appears in construction data; it shows up only in company capex and in U.S. imports.

▶ Reconciling 9% and 40%: why construction is a small share of capex but a large share of a project

The chart above shows the building side of a representative 1 GW campus at about 40% of the all-in cost. The chart in the previous section shows Census data center construction put in place at about 9% of four-company capex in 2026. The two ratios have different numerators and different denominators. The following items account for the difference; the size of each is not published and is not estimated here.

Denominator: capex includes spending that involves no new data center construction

• Hardware refresh in existing buildings. Servers and accelerators are replaced on a multi-year cycle. Microsoft states that about two-thirds of its capex is short-lived assets; Alphabet states that about 60% of its Q2 2026 capex was servers. The share of that hardware going into buildings that already exist, rather than new ones, is not disclosed.
• Capex outside data centers. Reported capex covers each company’s whole property base. Amazon reports AWS property and equipment of $190 billion against a company total of $357 billion; the remainder is fulfillment, logistics, transportation and other segments. Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft capex includes office campuses, network and subsea cable, devices and other categories that are not broken out.
• Capex outside the United States. Alphabet, Meta and Microsoft hold 63% to 88% of long-lived assets in the U.S., and the U.S. accounted for 68% to 92% of each company’s latest annual increase; Amazon does not disclose geography. The Census series covers U.S. construction only.
• Leased capacity. Where a hyperscaler leases a building from a developer, the construction appears in the Census series but not in the hyperscaler’s capex, except for the finance-lease amounts Meta and Microsoft include. This channel works in the opposite direction from the three above.

Numerator: the building side of a project includes costs Census does not count as construction

• Land. 7% of the Cushman & Wakefield building-side cost mix. Excluded from construction put in place by definition.
• Contingency and escalation. 16% and 3% of the building-side mix. These are budget allowances rather than work performed; they enter the Census series only to the extent they are spent on construction.
• Owner-purchased equipment. Power infrastructure (21%), cooling (12%) and tenant fit-out (15%) are 48% of the building-side mix. The Census definition of construction put in place includes “plumbing, heating, electrical work, elevators, escalators, central air-conditioning, emergency backup power, and other similar building services” and excludes “production machinery and equipment.” Which of a data center’s owner-furnished items (switchgear, transformers, chillers, racks, network gear) respondents classify on each side is not published.

Coverage: the Census numerator is wider than the four companies

• The Census data center line counts all private U.S. data center construction, including colocation developers, neocloud operators and enterprises, not only Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft. On this count the 9% overstates the four companies’ own construction share.

Sources: Cushman & Wakefield, Data Center Development Cost Guide 2026 (cost mix); Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft 10-K filings and Q2 2026 earnings calls (hardware share, segment and geographic disclosures); U.S. Census Bureau, Construction Spending definitions. census.gov

Data Center Construction in Context

• Data center construction put in place is running at about $64 billion a year (January to July 2026, annualized). That is 3% of all U.S. construction ($2.1 trillion, public and private, every sector, on the same basis), 9% of the four hyperscalers’ 2026 capex ($732 billion, global, mostly hardware), 0.9% of U.S. business income ($7.2 trillion), 0.2% of GDP ($31.9 trillion) and 0.04% of U.S. net wealth ($166.7 trillion, a stock rather than an annual flow).[7]
• If the AI build-out slowed sharply, the direct construction exposure is the $64 billion bar: about 0.2% of GDP, comparable to a single year’s decline in housing construction (see the sector chart below), and concentrated in a small number of markets and trades (electrical, mechanical, switchgear) rather than spread across the industry.
• The $700+ billion estimated hyperscaler capex figure is widely cited and dominates much of the data center “bubble” debate. This capex is comprised mostly of imported hardware, so its footprint in U.S. GDP is smaller than the headline, but it is potentially very consequential for markets due to its role in underpinning revenues, profits and valuations for a large part of the U.S. stock market, starting with NVIDIA, Oracle, Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Microsoft, Meta and now SpaceX, among others.

U.S. Share of Hyperscaler Capex

• The 10-K geographic note is the only primary disclosure of where the assets sit. Alphabet has 75% of its long-lived assets in the U.S., Meta 88%, Microsoft 63%; the U.S. share of each company’s latest annual increase was 73%, 92% and 68%.[8]
• Amazon reports property and equipment by segment only (AWS $190 billion of $357 billion) and does not disclose geography.
• Put together: roughly two-thirds to three-quarters of the buildings are in the United States, and most of the money inside them is imported.

U.S. Data Center Construction (Put in Place)

• Data center construction was $1.6 billion at an annual rate in January 2014 and $11 billion in January 2022; it reached $75.2 billion in July 2026, up 57% in a year and roughly double two years earlier.[3]
• Calendar-year totals: $20 billion in 2023, $35 billion in 2024, $50 billion in 2025; January to July 2026 was $37 billion, up 35% on the same months of 2025, or $64 billion annualized.
• Cumulative construction from 2022 through July 2026 is about $154 billion; 2022 through 2024 alone sums to $67 billion.
• Census files data centers as a sub-type of office. In January to July 2026 they were 50% of all office construction (private and public) and 8.6% of all private nonresidential construction; at the July rate, 54% and 10%.

U.S. Construction by Sector (2026)

• Total construction put in place, January to July 2026, is down 3.5% from the same months of 2025; excluding data centers it is down 4.3%. Residential, 42% of all construction, is down 4.1%, a decline of $22 billion over seven months ($38 billion annualized); at the July seasonally adjusted rate the residential decline is $69 billion, about the size of the entire data center line.
• Data centers are 3.0% of all construction, up from 2.1% in the same months of 2025, and the only category of size growing at a double-digit rate (+35%). The Census office total is up 8% on the year; office excluding data centers is down 9.5%.
• Manufacturing, the previous boom category, is down 22% from the same months of 2025 as the CHIPS Act plants complete. Power (+3.6%) and highway and street (+2.4%) are the other large categories growing.

What to Watch For in 2026 and Beyond

Sources to Track Data Center Construction and Capex in 2026:

Source	Report / Series	Frequency	Notes
U.S. Census Bureau	Construction Spending (C30), data center line	Monthly, first business day	Two-month lag; latest month preliminary, prior two revised
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft	Quarterly earnings releases and calls; capex and guidance	Quarterly, late January, April, July, October	Bases differ by company; state the basis when summing
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft	10-K geographic note on long-lived assets	Annual (February; Microsoft August)	Amazon reports by segment only
ConstructConnect	Data center construction starts report	Monthly	Project value at groundbreaking; industry data vendor
Cushman & Wakefield	Data Center Development Cost Guide	Annual	Cost per MW and cost mix, excluding chips

Sources

• U.S. Census Bureau, Construction Spending (C30), Value of Private Construction Put in Place, September 1, 2026 release. census.gov
• U.S. Census Bureau, Construction Spending, July 2026 release (September 1, 2026), Tables 1 and 2: total, private and public construction by type. census.gov
• CRE42, U.S. National Balance Sheet (business income, GDP and net wealth denominators; BEA NIPA and Federal Reserve Z.1). inflation-debt-balance-sheet.html
• Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft, Forms 10-K, fiscal 2020 through 2026, and Q2 2026 earnings releases and calls.
• ConstructConnect, September 2026 Data Center Report. constructconnect.com
• Cushman & Wakefield, Data Center Development Cost Guide 2026. cushmanwakefield.com
• McKinsey & Company, The Cost of Compute: A $7 Trillion Race to Scale Data Centers (April 2025). mckinsey.com

Methodology & Data Notes

Annualization. Unless labeled otherwise, 2026 construction figures on this page are January to July totals (not seasonally adjusted) multiplied by 12/7. This pro rata convention is used for data center construction put in place ($37.2 billion, $64 billion annualized), ConstructConnect starts ($84.1 billion, $144 billion annualized) and total U.S. construction ($1,244.6 billion, $2,134 billion annualized). It differs from the Census seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR), which expresses one month’s seasonally adjusted pace as a full year ($75.2 billion for data centers in July 2026). The pro rata figure understates a full year slightly when January to March are seasonally light months, and it lags the SAAR when the pace is rising within the year. Hyperscaler capex is calendar 2026 guidance and needs no annualization.

Construction put in place. The Census Bureau’s monthly estimate of the dollar value of construction work done on site during the month: shell, structure, and the building’s electrical and mechanical systems. It excludes land, IT equipment, and off-site utility generation and transmission (which fall in the separate power category). The seasonally adjusted annual rate (SAAR) removes normal seasonal swings and expresses one month’s pace as a full year; it is not a cumulative total. Calendar totals on this page sum the not-seasonally-adjusted monthly values. Data centers are classified as a sub-type of office.

Hyperscaler capex. Purchases of property and equipment from each company’s cash flow statement. Meta includes principal payments on finance leases, matching its own reported capex; Microsoft’s June fiscal years are assigned to the calendar year in which they begin; Amazon is gross of proceeds and incentives. 2026 is the midpoint of guidance from the July 2026 earnings calls. Capex is global and includes chips, servers, land, leases and capitalized software, so the construction share is indicative rather than an accounting identity.

Cost distribution. The building side applies Cushman & Wakefield’s 2026 greenfield cost mix to $20 billion per GW, the upper part of its $8.9 million to $23.3 million per MW range, appropriate for AI-class density and 2N redundancy; C&W’s figure excludes chips and GPUs. The IT hardware layer assumes hardware is 60% of the all-in total (McKinsey; Alphabet), giving $20 billion divided by 0.4, or $50 billion, with $30 billion of hardware. Microsoft’s two-thirds would imply $40 billion of hardware and a $60 billion total. As a physical cross-check, 1 GW of IT load supports roughly 700,000 to 800,000 accelerators at 1.2 to 1.4 kW each all-in; at $30,000 to $40,000 per accelerator that is $21 billion to $32 billion in chips before servers, memory and networking. Published bounds run from about $30 billion per GW (Epoch AI, 2025) to $60–80 billion (NVIDIA, 2025). The figures are representative, not a quotation for any project.

Long-lived assets by geography. Alphabet and Meta report property and equipment plus operating lease assets by location; Microsoft reports long-lived assets excluding financial and tax assets by the location of the controlling statutory company. Because these are stocks of everything built to date, the U.S. share of the latest year’s increase is the closer proxy for where current capital spending is landing. Amazon discloses property and equipment by segment only.

Third-party sources. ConstructConnect (construction starts) is an industry data vendor rather than a government series and is used as the source of record for starts because no public series exists; it is cited with its own URL.