Welcome back to The Month in Infrastructure, a monthly recap of the top trends affecting the built environment and the people who work in it.
The AI buildout is getting sorted into two piles: What will get built and what will not. The sorting came down to five things every project needs at once: Permission, power, cooling, land and people. Here’s what moved the needle.
The “bragawatt” reckoning
Only about 35% of announced US data center capacity is likely to get built, according to a Bernstein Research report. The firm expects established hyperscalers to finish what they start. It used the term “bragawatts” for big pledges from newcomers with little track record, including Kevin O’Leary’s 15-gigawatt plan. Business Insider reported that Amazon Web Services expects $5 billion worth of Nvidia GB300 racks and lacks the power to run them. They will sit in warehouses until its data centers are upgraded.
Permission is the second filter, and state leaders are tightening it. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently signed seven data center bills in a package that creates a special electricity rate and requires energy, water and environmental reporting. Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo has ordered developers to cover all project-related costs and sign binding community support commitments. Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger banned nondisclosure agreements and sped up energy and noise rules. However, New York remains the only state with a full moratorium.
Data centers go shopping for nuclear
The projects that clear those filters are hunting for electricity that already exists, and nuclear is a strong candidate. Constellation signed a 20-year agreement with Amazon for 690 megawatts from Calvert Cliffs, the 1,790-megawatt plant in Lusby, Md. The company says Amazon’s commitment unlocks $3 billion in upgrades that will add about 190 megawatts between 2030 and 2032. It also provides the revenue certainty to relicense the plant for another 20 years.
The power goes onto the regional grid for every customer, not to Amazon data centers, Constellation executive David Dardis told Maryland Matters. Amazon buys price and supply certainty. It also abandoned a planned data center campus at the same site in August after community pushback. In June, Calvert County voters ousted all three commissioners who had opposed a data center moratorium. Amazon dropped the campus and kept the power deal.
In Wisconsin, Oracle plans to buy 125 to 250 megawatts from the Point Beach nuclear plant for its Port Washington campus. Oracle says that shifts about $300 million in costs away from We Energies customers. The utility’s contract for Point Beach power is the largest single driver of its proposed $176 million rate hike for 2027, at around 20% of the increase. The deal needs state approval, and Oracle expects to file by year-end, Forbes reported.
Liquid cooling rewrites the spec sheet
Power gets a facility to the front door. Heat decides what happens inside. Rack densities have climbed from roughly 10 to 15 kilowatts toward 100 kilowatts and beyond, and the materials list has to keep up.
The big break comes when a facility moves from air cooling to liquid, said Nicholas Champagne, global market manager for batteries and data centers at Arkema, in an interview with SmartBrief. Air and its incremental upgrades leave most materials alone. Liquid brings coolant distribution units and with them different piping, sealants and adhesives.
Champagne sees the real bottleneck at the chip. Thermal design power for coming generations could pass 2 kilowatts and approach 3, which may exceed what water cooling can handle across such a small surface. Cold plates now have very thin fins and narrow gaps, so the water must be pure enough not to clog them. Corrosion remains a main concern. Leaks are what outsiders fear most, though companies with experience have sealants and seals that address it.
Fire risk rises for the same reasons: More power, more liquid and denser layouts, with expensive equipment at stake. Specifiers often work from a partial picture, he said, which leaves some redundancy and some gaps. Retrofits are possible where a hall already has a cold water loop, though only partially.
The yard behind the data center
Even a project with power and cooling needs somewhere to stage the work. Industrial leasing reached 202.6 million square feet in the third quarter, up 38.5% from a year earlier and the strongest quarter since 2022, according to JLL. Energy and utilities tenants doubled their share of leasing to 4.6%. Construction materials and building fixtures sat at 14.7%.
The most telling corner is industrial outdoor storage. where rents are up 32% since 2021, according to CBRE. In eight hot port-linked markets, including Houston, Alterra IOS puts the increase above 110% since 2020. Brookfield, J.P. Morgan Asset Management and Starwood Property Trust are moving in, according to The Wall Street Journal.
In Manassas, Va., more than 200 acres of outdoor storage is slated to become data centers, over 20% of local supply, according to a Catalyst Investment Partners co-founder. Data centers are consuming the land used to build data centers. Developers can absorb the rents anyway because yards are a small slice of a project budget, Newmark’s Chris Hope told WSJ.
Entry-level workers want the tools
A survey commissioned by STACK Construction Technologies suggests the newest workers want better tools than they are getting. Censuswide polled 500 US construction workers ages 18 to 35 with three years or less of experience in August. Some 82% said they would be more likely to stay with an employer that invested in modern technology to capture and share knowledge. That rises to 90% among workers 18 to 25. Three in four lack formal training.
They also see a leadership gap. A slim majority, 51%, believe their leaders view AI negatively or do not prioritize it. One in four say younger workers are pushing for new tools and meeting resistance from tenured decision-makers. Missing expertise most often shows up as project delays (34%), and 26% said those delays led to costly mistakes.
STACK CEO Viyas Sundaram says AI’s best use is capturing institutional knowledge. Most contractors are small or midsize, so the person doing takeoffs and estimates is often doing it between truck rides to a job site. Less paperwork frees veterans to teach. He wants veterans to lead any rollout because they can tell whether a tool helps or only feels like help.
His cautions are accuracy and privacy. Plenty of vendors attach the letters AI to a product that is 60% to 70% accurate, he said, and workers who trade personal data for convenience as consumers may paste proprietary insights into a random prompt. Bolting AI onto existing workflows buys small gains, like rerouting conduit with the drywall still up. Redesigning the workflow around the data could unlock 50% to 100% gains instead of 10% to 15%, by his estimate.