Data center construction spending in the US rose 57% in the 12 months leading up to July 2027, while total construction employment rose just 1%.

AGC of America’s analysis of Census Bureau data puts this boom into context: even as data center construction surged, other private office construction fell 10.6% over the period. A 2026 Global Data Center Outlook report released by JLL describes where this significant change within the industry is heading. Developers are shifting to building data centers as phased campuses, with a single campus reaching hundreds of megawatts. JLL expects hyperscalers to keep fielding this demand through 2030, both by leasing space and building their own facilities. For tradespeople, that means years of work in the same regions as they move from one phase to the next.

Most coverage treats the workforce side as a hiring problem. As an example, there aren’t enough electricians in the industry, so government and industry leaders say firms should recruit harder and train more. This is true and worth doing, but training an electrician takes four or five years—and these campuses are being scheduled now.

In the meantime, the industry must get more output from the people it already has, and I think we keep looking for that gain in the wrong place.

Electrical work accounts for 45% to 70% of a typical data center’s construction budget, according to the IBEW. The electricians completing these jobs rotate. A crew finishes a phase on one campus and moves to the next—same trade partner, sometimes the same owner, and maybe a different city or state.

But at each new gate, they start over. Qualifications that were real a month before on the last jobsite don’t travel with the worker. Instead, valuable time is spent on a fresh orientation, fresh site rules, and fresh requirements of proof that their certificates and training are current.

On a hypothetical campus with 500 workers and 80 subcontractors, that adds up to a lot of skilled hours spent re-proving things that were already true.

Prefab helps

One solution is to take work off the jobsite entirely. During a data center panel at the 2026 Annual Convention for AGC of America, Matt Raponi, senior manager of data center construction procurement for the Americas at Amazon Web Services, described moving electrical assembly into a factory. In his experience, this shift to prefabrication has enabled the same electricians to produce more, while also keeping the site less congested. Importantly, testing can happen once in a single location, rather than building by building across a campus.

More prefabricated solutions are coming, and prefab works. But it also has a ceiling. Installation, coordination, inspection, and commissioning still need people in the field. So how do we make the field more efficient?

The field time problem

Most of the safety and compliance information on a large project isn’t generated in the trailer. Instead, this data (and subsequent documentation) is generated by a subcontractor foreman signing a crew in at 6:30 am, a worker completing a pre-task plan before high-risk work, or a superintendent checking permits from four trade partners before anyone starts. Ultimately, the paperwork demand often lands directly on the people spread thinnest on the project.

A superintendent on a large data center project put it candidly on a recent call: “I’m getting paperwork in three different formats—Procore forms, emailed copies, and text copies. As long as they get us the paper in some format, I’m not too worried about it. But it’s adding a lot of additional record keeping.”

On a data center project, the larger headcount turns a nuisance into a real burden. Northern Virginia is one of the largest data center markets in the world, and Virginia’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission studied the industry’s effect on the state. Its report found that about 1,500 workers are on site at peak construction for a single data center building, and a full campus (with multiple buildings) can take up to five years to complete. Each worker needs an orientation, a training check, and a pre-task plan before work starts. Multiply three formats of paperwork by thousands of workers over several years, and a missing training record or orientation becomes easy to miss.

Industry-wide implications

Although data center demand has highlighted the paperwork problem, the issue extends beyond data center builds and the solution is much needed across construction.

On a very large paper mill project in the Southwest, WIELAND Construction had close to 200 workers a day working nearly around-the-clock shifts. The dedicated project safety lead was spending 30% to 40% of the day processing paperwork instead of being on the floor.

After moving orientations, sign-ins, and job hazard analyses onto a digital platform, WIELAND cut time spent on safety paperwork by 40%, and JSA prep dropped from two hours to 30 minutes per superintendent each morning. Using the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ mean wage for construction supervisors, the freed-up 90 minutes are worth about $15,600 a year per person.

Tepa Companies, headquartered in Missouri, piloted a digital platform on a single Iowa jobsite. After finding early success, the company standardized the same process across projects in four states. Overall, orientation time has halved and, importantly, safety data now moves with the workforce as crews cycle between sites instead of resetting at every new project.

When the labor pool is fixed and the project pipeline isn’t, the constraint is not only how many qualified people exist, but how quickly you can prove which of them is standing at the gate this morning and get them onto the tools.

While data centers have presented a strong case for modular assembly and field technology solutions, neither of these options solves the skilled labor shortage. Nothing currently on the market does. What these solutions can change is how much of a scarce worker’s day is spent on tasks that require their expertise—and how much time is lost to work that could be done more efficiently. Data centers are accelerating experimentation with these approaches at scale, responding to a question the whole industry is asking: how can we verify more efficiently?

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To hear more from Simon Elliot and the Breadcrumb team, join us at the upcoming Buildings Conference: Data Centers & AI Infrastructure—taking place September 30-October 1, 2026, in Nashville, Tenn. Elliot will be pitching the AI-enabled startup during the signature BuiltWorlds Demo Day Competition.