• Often, contractors don’t alone have the bandwidth to take on a hyperscale project
• The Boldt Company director sees AI growth driving a new industrial revolution
• Ultra low vacancy rates show demand isn’t slowing

AI-driven data center demand is reshaping the construction market, forcing general contractors to rethink traditional competition models and explore joint ventures to deliver increasingly complex projects, according to The Boldt Company.

“Demand from the market requires all of us to work together to build teams, combine our teams in order to execute for this industry,” Dale Lewis, The Boldt Company data center development director, told NPM in an interview. “Being in construction for 45 years, I’m excited to see that kind of cooperation.”

Boldt, a 137-year-old Wisconsin-based general construction company, has recently begun expanding its data center development division and primarily works on 50 MW to 150 MW projects, Lewis said.

The company also has experience delivering mission-critical and power infrastructure projects, with a portfolio that includes a 9,070-square-foot corporate data center for Children’s Wisconsin, a 50 MW biomass-fueled cogeneration facility for We Energies, a 300 MW combined-cycle power plant for Basin Electric and multiple renewable energy projects, according to the company’s website.

Lewis said the firm is not pursuing multi-gigawatt campuses, similar to many other general contractors in the market, as they don’t “have the bandwidth to execute a project of that scale by themselves.”

Like many within the data center and digital infrastructure industry, he doesn’t expect the growth to slow for some time.

“When you have an industry that has less than a 2% vacancy rate over a two-year period of strike, that’s an obvious, painful indicator of demand,” Lewis said. “As more and more Fortune 500 companies adopt AI into their business model, you’re going to see demand to supply that technology grow. We need facilities to deliver on that demand.”

He added that the industry is still in the early stages of what he described as a “fifth industrial revolution,” driven by advancements in AI and the infrastructure needed to support it.

Supporting that growth will require successful and timely power generation and delivery — an effort data centers are increasingly shaping through private investments in behind-the-meter and onsite generation, making them active participants in the power market rather than solely large loads on the grid.

“Behind the meter developed by data center industry is going to contribute to that power generation capability, and it’s going to help us meet demand for the future, not only from the data center sector itself, but any other industry that’s going to become a large load consumer,” Lewis said.

He framed data center infrastructure as “the fifth utility” alongside electricity, telecom, gas and water.

For Lewis, data centers sit at the intersection of several major industry shifts, from AI adoption and construction demand to private power investment.

“I’m here advocating and pushing for continued development within the industry,” he said. “I don’t see a bubble anytime soon.”