AI Takeoff Turns Data Centers Into America’s New Building Boom

US companies are plowing money into building data centers as they race to get ahead in artificial intelligence.

Private construction spending on data centers has surged close to $30 billion a year, according to the most recent numbers from the Census Bureau, more than double what it was in late 2022 when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released to the public.

Corporate America now allocates a bigger building budget for data centers than it does for all kinds of categories that were attracting more cash as recently as last year, from hotels to retail and leisure facilities.

The US ...