See the New Building Techniques Turbocharging the Data-Center Boom

See the New Building Techniques Turbocharging the Data-Center Boom

Hyperscalers’ need for speed is spawning timesaving products and building techniques

By John Keilman and Jemal R. Brinson, WSJ

Sept. 1, 2026

In the $1 trillion race to build AI data centers, time is money and money is no object.

It can take up to three years to build a large data center, time that hyperscalers battling for supremacy in artificial intelligence can’t afford to lose. So companies are coming up with products and building techniques designed to slice hours, days or months off the process.

“If you don’t put up capacity faster than your competitor, you fall behind,” said Eliot Ahdoot, president of Montreal-based Hypertec Construction. “That’s what it comes down to. If you can’t develop or train it faster than your competitor, it means you’ll have a worse system than your competitor.”

The U.S. has far more data centers than any other country, but China has an advantage when it comes to construction time, thanks in part to abundant power and minimal red tape. “Their velocity of building things is extraordinarily high,” Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang has said.

Investors and executives are increasingly questioning the returns they are getting on colossal AI investments, and a public revolt over the spread of data centers is leading to bans in some areas. Even so, construction is expected to remain strong for years to come.

“There’s this confluence of so many different things happening at once that our industry is being reshaped,” said Ben Kaplan, managing director of Turner, a construction company whose record speed for building a data center is 90 days.

Here are some of the products and practices that are sending the pace of construction into overdrive:

John Keilman covers U.S. manufacturing from The Wall Street Journal’s Chicago bureau. He writes about large global companies such as 3M, Harley-Davidson and Whirlpool and has particular interests in factory safety, humanoid robots and physical AI.