A 100-megawatt data center used to be considered massive. Now developers are building gigawatt-scale campuses that cost tens of billions and demand tens of thousands of tradespeople. Here's an inside look at the five largest U.S. data center projects underway in 2026, who's building them, what makes each one uniquely complicated, and why skilled labor has become the real bottleneck.

Most of the time, the expensive problems in construction ops aren't the obvious ones. They're the costs that are real, recurring, and completely invisible until someone decides to go looking.

Temp labor operations are one of the biggest sources of invisible cost in non-union industrial construction — not because contractors are making bad decisions, but because the systems most teams use to manage contingent labor were never designed to surface what they're spending. Here are five signs your temp labor program is quietly costing you more than it should.

For general contractors who self-perform, controlling your own labor is a real competitive advantage — until your crew size stops matching the work in front of you. Too many workers and you're bleeding overhead. Too few and schedules slip. And when you need a specialty trade worker who isn't on your payroll, every day spent searching is a day the project falls behind. Here's how the most profitable self-performing GCs are solving it.