Data centers and advanced factories now compete for the same crews, DPR says

From the parking lot, a semiconductor fab and an AI data center campus look nothing alike. Behind the walls, DPR Construction says, they increasingly need the same things. The contractor's fourth-quarter 2026 advanced technology market analysis, reported November 5 by Construction Owners, names four requirements the two markets now share: power availability, technical planning, workforce capacity and prefabrication.

Gigawatt campuses and 12 MW inference sites

AI workloads are pushing data center design toward more electrical capacity, denser computing and more advanced cooling, according to the Construction Owners account of DPR's analysis. The biggest projects have moved past the traditional hyperscale building toward campuses sized in hundreds of megawatts, with some carrying gigawatt-scale requirements. At the other end, smaller inference facilities of roughly 12 MW to 36 MW are getting attention because operators want compute closer to cities and to the enterprises that use it.

The map is spreading as well. Developers are looking beyond Northern Virginia, Texas and Phoenix toward Wyoming, Missouri, Ohio, Indiana, Louisiana and other parts of the Midwest, wherever land and power line up.

Set the two lists side by side and the overlap is physical. Both building types run on heavy electrical service and complex mechanical, electrical and plumbing (MEP) systems, and both work to schedules that reward assembling as much as possible off site. DPR's conclusion is that contractors strong in MEP, modular construction and coordinated project delivery stand to gain.

The geography matters for owners. For a manufacturing owner in one of those newer data center states, the spread suggests the local trade market could shift even when nothing about its own project has changed.

Shared trades, shared bills

DPR made the cost case for this in its third-quarter Market Conditions Report, released September 30. The report found that electricians, mechanical trades, commissioning specialists and experienced field leaders are working across several high-growth sectors at once: digital infrastructure, healthcare, advanced manufacturing, transportation and energy.

Aguilar added that even when demand in an owner's own sector is flat, the overlap can still affect cost, schedule and execution. That's the hard part for a capital projects team. Supply networks continue to function, DPR said, but concentrated demand can influence pricing, lead times and availability. The producer price index for new nonresidential construction inputs rose 8.4% year over year through May 2026, the largest annual increase since the pandemic period.

GroundBreak Carolinas said electrical-intensive projects are particularly vulnerable because they depend on copper, switchgear, transformers and other equipment subject to supply chain constraints. Hiring points the same way: demand for electricians and other skilled trades associated with data center development remains especially strong. The outlet said contractors increasingly need to revisit procurement strategies, escalation provisions, contingency allowances and project schedules.

A higher floor for escalation

JLL's Global Construction Costs Index, published October 15, puts the long view on that pressure. Annual cost escalation of 3% to 6% is now the planning baseline, up from 2% to 3% before 2020. JLL forecasts global costs rising 3.5% to 4.7% in 2026 and 3.1% to 4.2% in 2027, with North America at 3.2% to 4.2%, driven by material costs, US trade policy and labor shortages. The index draws on more than 1,000 projects across six building types in 14 markets.

Labor is the stubborn piece. Construction wages rose 8% to 35% across markets between 2020 and 2026, JLL found.

Prefab as the shared workaround

DPR runs more than 1.4 million square feet of prefabrication assembly capacity to support projects nationwide. That is a capacity figure.

Verdantix analyst Sophie Planken-Bichler, writing in June from the Dassault Systèmes AEC Global Summit in Paris, explained why data centers suit this approach. Because of their modular nature, they are less constrained by architectural complexity and more reliant on repeatable systems, and she named DPR as an example of a major data center builder pursuing industrialization. Hyperscale builds, often located in labor-constrained rural regions, are also accelerating the shift toward factory-based delivery, which offers a scalable alternative to traditional site labor.

Verdantix also looked beyond data centers. It noted that the UK's New Hospital Programme is mandating modern methods of construction, such as off-site modular prefabrication, to reduce costs, shorten timelines and cut emissions. Verdantix cautions that the economics of industrialized construction depend heavily on scale.

There's a catch for owners. Prefab moves labor off the jobsite and into a shop, but shop capacity is a shared resource too. For manufacturing owners, that suggests shop slots could become another point of competition with data center programs, on top of the competition they already face for field crews.

Factory owners in data center country

Manufacturing owners in the states data center developers have only recently discovered could feel this first. Ohio, Indiana, Missouri and Louisiana are among the locations now attracting developer interest, and DPR's analysis puts both sectors in those markets at the same time.

Watch the bids in those states. They could show whether the overlap DPR describes is local and measurable for manufacturing projects there.