Data Center Watch — $30B in Georgia, 5 GW in Louisiana: The Biggest Construction Program in America

AI data centers are now the largest private construction program in the United States, and the numbers this week keep escalating.

The week's announcements

• OpenAI — $30 billion, 3.2 GW, Georgia. "Project Camellia" near Savannah, with phased power delivery from 2028 to 2032.
• Meta — $50+ billion, 5 GW, Louisiana. The Richland Parish campus expansion has now crossed fifty billion dollars in committed investment.
• Crusoe + Lancium — 1.0 GW, Childress, Texas. A 270-acre grid-connected AI campus.
• Energy Vault — Snyder, Texas. Construction underway on an AI infrastructure campus for Crusoe Cloud: 8 MW of powered shell in phase one, expandable to 25 MW.
• Galaxy Digital — Helios, West Texas. Phase I complete: ~200 MW gross power delivered, 133 MW of critical IT load leased to CoreWeave for 15 years.
• And a private team is proposing a $100B data center and power megaproject on the former federal uranium-enrichment site in Paducah, Kentucky.

The supply chain is racing to keep up

nVent leased a new 160,000 SF manufacturing facility in Minnesota just to meet liquid-cooling demand. In Texas, regulators approved a net-metering arrangement for a 260 MW data center co-located with a wind farm — a regulatory template that will speed up the next wave.

Why this matters to contractors nowhere near Savannah

These campuses consume national supplies of switchgear, transformers, structural steel, precast, and skilled labor. When one region absorbs billions in construction, materials pricing and crew availability move everywhere — including here in Pennsylvania. Our estimating team folds these demand signals into how we price lead-time risk on every exterior package.

The buildings themselves are also envelope-intensive: miles of metal panel, precast skin, louvers, and rainscreen. The contractors who understand high-performance cladding systems are the ones who'll be invited to these tables.

Nexen monitors data-center construction daily as part of our construction-intelligence network. Talk to us about an envelope package.