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| Breitbart Business Digest: The AI Boom Hiding in the Backrooms of Census Bureau Data |
| 2026-06-02 |
| The main Census release does not have an AI data center line. Instead, data center construction is lumped together with lots of other spending on business structures in the broader “office” categories. And that can create the misleading impression that office construction is booming. It jumped one percent in April and is up 9.4 percent from a year ago. An office construction boom would be weird given the rise of remote work and the slow growth of the U.S. workforce. So what’s really going on? If you look beneath the hood, you can see the real engine of growth is AI. Although the data doesn’t appear in the main release, the detailed data file from Census Bureau breaks office construction spending into three buckets: general, data center, and financial. AI data center construction spending, on the other hand, is soaring. Compared with a year ago, it is up 28.1 percent to $50.7 billion. It now accounts for 52 percent of private office construction and 2.3 percent of all construction spending. On a longer timeline, the growth is truly explosive. Compared with February 2020, spending is up around 420 percent. The shift has been remarkably fast. A year earlier, in April 2025, data centers accounted for 44.5 percent of private office construction. Two years earlier, in April 2024, they were just 32.9 percent. In dollar terms, data center construction has climbed from $28.3 billion in April 2024 to $39.6 billion in April 2025 and $50.7 billion in April 2026. But the AI construction boom is not just data centers. We’re also seeing it in the line items covering private power construction spending. Private power construction, which includes gas and oil, rose to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $148.7 billion in April, up 6.0 percent from a year earlier. The more revealing figure is the electric subcategory. Electric power construction climbed to $127.1 billion, up 7.3 percent from April 2025 and 9.9 percent from two years earlier. Electric now accounts for 85.4 percent of private power construction, up from 84.4 percent a year ago and 83.5 percent two years ago. In dollar terms, the electric category increased by $8.6 billion over the past year, slightly more than the entire $8.4 billion increase in the broader power category. That means the growth in power construction is really growth in the electric infrastructure needed for a more electricity-intensive economy, including the data centers, cooling systems, substations, transformers, and backup systems behind the AI buildout. |
| Posted by:Skidmark |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-06-02 11:47 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-06-02 08:18 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-06-02 08:16 |
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| Posted by: Besoeker 2026-06-02 07:05 |
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| Posted by: Skidmark 2026-06-02 07:01 |