America is officially spending more on building data centers than offices
It’s finally happened: spending on data center construction surpassed offices for the first time at the end of last year. America’s construction spending on data centers reached a record annualized rate of $45 billion in December, crossing paths with declining private office outlays at $44 billion, per US Census Bureau data.
Recently, research from CBRE found that data center capacity under construction actually fell from 6.35 megawatts in 2024 to 5.99 megawatts by the end of 2025 — but the bottleneck doesn’t appear to be demand, but more mundane supply issues, with deal implementation at the local level, including slow permitting and constrained supply chains, seemingly causing the slowdown.
Indeed, considering how hyperscaler clients are trying to secure power capacity, it’s hard to imagine the data center line not expanding its lead in the chart above. Just last week, Meta signed a five-year AI infrastructure deal with Nebius worth up to $27 billion.
And with skyrocketing demand, construction costs are jumping, too — helping construction firms to become the best-performing non-Iran-related segment of the stock market this year, as my colleague Matt Phillips pointed out: Tech giants including Microsoft and Oracle can’t get data centers built fast enough. Construction stocks are ripping on the demand.
