Construction Needs 349,000 New Workers in 2026. The Data Center Boom Can’t Wait for Them

The construction industry is having one of its best years in a decade in terms of demand, and one of its worst for finding the people to meet it.

Demand is largely related to construction of data centers, with reports of planning for commercial projects running 37.2% higher in April than a year earlier. Without them, the increase is just 5.8%. Contractors placed data centers at the top of their expectations for 2026 in a survey by the Associated General Contractors, the only building segment where optimism climbed by double digits.

However, the workforce needed to build these centers is nowhere to be found. Recent reports show that the industry needs 349,000 more workers this year and 456,000 next year just to keep pace. In fact, Deloitte puts the cost of not closing the workforce gap at $124 billion in lost output and a shortfall of more than two million skilled trade workers by 2028.

The usual answer to a labor shortage is to automate around it, and construction has started to do so. Robots that lay block, tie rebar, and print floor-plan layouts straight onto the slab are working on job sites now, most often on data center builds. Skanska, one of the largest contractors in the world, uses a layout robot from Dusty Robotics that it says halves the time the task takes.

Brasfield & Gorrie, one of the largest privately held construction firms in the U.S., is front and center as the demand vs. workforce drought situation in the building industry plays out. Chris Kramer, its chief strategy officer, does not expect technology to make up the labor shortage any time soon.

“Construction today, in some ways, is just like it was when we built the pyramid 6,000 years ago,” said Kramer, who works out of Birmingham, Alabama, where the firm was founded in 1964. “It’s largely a person stacking a block on top of another block. We’re a little bit more technologically advanced than we were back then. Fundamentally, it’s still a lot of the same.”

That is why a demand surge lands differently in construction than in an industry that can scale with software. The work still has to be done by hand, on site, by people with specific training, and Kramer expects that to hold through the rest of his career.

He told International Business Times he will retire before “robots take over,” because construction is “still kind of a labor-focused industry that we’re trying to find ways to insert technology into.”

Even on the projects driving the current boom, the ceiling is people. “The energy part’s getting figured out,” Kramer said of the data center buildout, pointing to deals between hyperscalers and power companies. “The challenge for finding labor is, I think, going to be increasingly a factor in consideration for where you place these.” Foremen and superintendents, the people who run job sites, sit at the center of that shortfall.

The Hardest Roles to Replace

Ninety-two percent of construction firms say they are struggling to find workers, and 45% say that difficulty has already delayed projects, according to a 2025 Associated General Contractors survey of roughly 1,400 firms. It found immigration enforcement had cut into labor supply unevenly by state, affecting 75% of Georgia firms and 36% in South Carolina, with Alabama, Virginia, and Nebraska in between. Construction is among the most immigrant-dependent industries in the country, and one of the oldest.

The belt tightens even more in relation to experienced workers. “We are dealing with an aging craft workforce in the construction industry, which is a real challenge,” Kramer said. “We don’t have an influx of youth like we had in the 50s, 60s, and 70s.”

The median construction worker age is now 42, a year older than the typical American worker, according to National Association of Home Builders analysis of census data, and with too few young people entering the trades to offset the retirements, that figure keeps climbing.

Deloitte projects 41% of the current workforce will retire by 2031. Entry-level trade hiring is hard; replacing the foremen and superintendents who run job sites is harder, because that knowledge takes years to build and the people who hold it are retiring faster than the pipeline behind them fills.

Kramer has watched the problem outlast his own attempts to solve it. “I was on the board of a workforce development organization here 20 years ago, and we still seem to struggle from a construction and trade standpoint of upskilling today just like we did 20 years ago.”

To help with worker development, Brasfield & Gorrie built a field craft training center in Birmingham, with others in progress in additional cities, where apprentices are paid while they train, instead of traveling to a central site on their own time. “We’re trying to strike that balance of creating apprenticeship programs where they come to a centralized location, get trained, they get paid for that, and they can start to create career paths,” Kramer said.

To backfill supervisors specifically, the firm places engineering and building-science graduates from Auburn University and the University of Alabama at Birmingham directly into foreman- and superintendent-level field roles, aimed at “the gap between the aging workforce and this next workforce,” in Kramer’s words. The older path still runs underneath it: “It’s craft workers who become foremen, who become superintendents, who become general superintendents.”

All of that assumes the industry will still need the people at all. There has been talk of how AI will replace human roles in industries from software development, to media, to accounting, but so far, AI showing up on the job site isn’t a major concern — for now.

The World Economic Forum projects 92 million jobs displaced worldwide by 2030; in U.S. construction, Goldman Sachs Research estimates the data center buildout has added about 212,000 jobs since 2022. Kramer sees the same inside his own firm, where AI has meant more work for the supervisors already on site rather than fewer of them. “If we adopt it and use it correctly, I don’t think it leads to workforce reductions,” he said. “I think it leads to workforce enhancements.”

Why Most Construction Tech Doesn’t Stick

If finding experienced construction workers is the bottleneck, is the alternative to pay for technological capability? That’s not so clear. Construction ranks second to last among major sectors on McKinsey‘s digitization index, ahead of only agriculture. About 45% of firms report no AI use at all, and fewer than 1% have it running across the organization, according to a 2025 RICS survey of more than 2,200 professionals, which found the top barrier to adoption is a shortage of people with the skills to implement it.

Despite this, there is capital flowing into new technologies. Construction-technology startups raised $3.7 billion in the first three quarters of 2025, more than double the same period a year earlier, with roughly two-thirds of it going to AI companies, according to Nymbl Ventures, which tracks the sector.

Kramer, however, is skeptical on whether solutions will come from outside the construction industry. “If a startup company is trying to do something innovative for the construction industry and none of the people there has ever worked in construction, they don’t really grasp what’s going on. They don’t know how construction really works,” he said. The pitches that go nowhere, he said, open with “I got an idea that’s going to blow your mind,” the ones that tend to work start with: “Tell me what really is challenging you.”

Construction also resists the template that works in software. “We’re not like manufacturing,” Kramer said, where a raw material moves down a line and comes off as a finished product. “Every construction company does things differently,” across data centers, hospitals, renovations, and strip centers, which is part of why a tool built without that context tends not to survive contact with a job site.

Kramer also points out that unlike other sectors, construction is highly diverse and “every construction company does things differently,” making it hard for a one-size-fits-all technology solution to be successful.

Rather than buying an outside solution, Brasfield & Gorrie built its own system, called Magnus.

The system runs on commercial large language models layered over the firm’s own history: six decades of pre-construction records and actual project costs. “If you’re a startup organization, you don’t have access to actual cost, historical cost in the last 60-plus years that we’ve been in business,” Kramer said. “That is our secret sauce.”

The tools that hold up in construction, he said, are the ones built from inside the industry rather than sold to it from outside.

The People Problem Outlasts the AI Question

The workforce shortage in construction predates generative AI, and it’s bigger than any one country. Construction output worldwide could fall $40 trillion short of demand by 2040 if productivity and workforce growth do not change, according to McKinsey.

Kramer spent most of his career moving around job sites before transitioning into a technology role; he still spends his free time building things by hand in his basement.

He is hopeful that the next generation will find the joy in building too.

“Maybe I’m not interested in working with AI,” he said, imagining a young worker weighing the option. “Maybe I do rediscover the excitement of working with my hands … and creating something tangible.” One thing’s for certain, the construction industry will be waiting.