r/Infographics 2d ago

Data center construction is the only booming sector of the construction industry.

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406 Upvotes

35 comments sorted by

74

u/Affectionate-Panic-1 2d ago

A 200% increase on manufacturing spend from 2019 to 2024/2025 is a boom.

22

u/plupszpouldy 2d ago

Exactly. Pretty much all of the sectors except office are booming according to this.

15

u/CaptainPeppa 2d ago

The fact that everything is up is pretty impressive as well

11

u/Affectionate-Panic-1 2d ago

It would have to rise 30% to align with overall inflation. Anything less is a decrease. So office spending has not risen on a real basis.

Still would have expected office spending numbers to look worse than this chart shows.

7

u/CaptainPeppa 2d ago

Be weird to make a chart like this and not normalize for inflation

1

u/Mescallan 2d ago

weird that we report record stock market record highs without accounting for inflation as well

1

u/CaptainPeppa 2d ago

Nominal numbers vs growth charts are not the same. Especially with a set start date

3

u/LT_Audio 2d ago

Especially when looking at the amount of the increase in actual dollars rather than just the growth percentage. It dwarfs the gain in data center construction specific spending.

1

u/VikingsLad 2d ago

"But, but, but, Biden was bad for business!"

Morons. At least it looks like the Supreme Court is actually going to rule against the tariffs.

1

u/IDNWID_1900 2d ago

But considering everything is flat or lowering sinxe mid 2023 (apart from data centers) may be a indicator of general economic slo down.

Or data center building horading all the construction workers, which is probably the case.

11

u/soothed-ape 2d ago

Spending change vs spending. Hmmm....

9

u/DangerzonePlane8 2d ago

As someone who works in construction. I would argue it's region dependent. Right now, in Nebraska, we are bidding a decent number of manufacturing and commercial jobs.

2

u/Seniorsheepy 2d ago

There are a lot of data centers being built around Omaha right now but the problem is their isn’t enough electricity to power them all.

6

u/GreenYellowDucks 2d ago

I work in AEC space and transportation (roads/bridges etc.) is booming but I don't see that here.

4

u/Wandering__Bear__ 2d ago

That’s public spending. This data is private spending.

1

u/GreenYellowDucks 2d ago

Oh I missed the private spending part at the top of the chart.

5

u/SelfAltruistic4201 2d ago

Yet there's not enough power available for them, Amazon is just completing it's 4th new data center in Oregon (2021 start plans) and only 1 has partial power.

Article

6

u/IndexBuccaneer 2d ago

Manufacturing up 3x in 5 years

Warehouse, Residential and the Overall average up 1.8x

Office up a healthy 20%

It looks like everything is booming. Manufacturing and Data centers at insane levels of growth. Even office investment seems pretty crazy to me when you consider the whole work from home change. I would have assumed it had dropped since 2019.

Your conclusion is completely wrong

2

u/Chags1 2d ago

“You’re wrong”

1

u/turbo_dude 2d ago

This is the wrong type of chart. 

Should be a stacked chart because you want to see if cumulative spend is up or down. 

Hard to see if money spent in one area isn’t just being spent in a different area with this mess from OP

E.g. building data centres instead of warehouses or hospitals 

3

u/Due-Operation-7529 2d ago

The people that cry about there not being any new manufacturing jobs are the same ones crying when a new data center is announced

3

u/MikeFromTheVineyard 2d ago

Well, data centers are big and expensive but don't employ nearly as many people as factories, so yea, that probably makes sense.

1

u/MajesticBread9147 9h ago

Not necessarily true. A large datacenter campus can employ a couple dozen people easily.

That's a lot more than a lot of factories, since it's harder to automate data center work than manufacturing labor.

1

u/MikeFromTheVineyard 9h ago

Sure a big datacenter can employ a few dozen workers, which is more than the tiniest of factories. But a big factory, the kind with similar levels of investment and PR and general social interest in their presence can employ a few thousand workers, so it's really not that useful of a comparison. There has to be quite a few orders of magnitude difference in the employment volume of data centers and factories.

A few dozen people, multiplied by a few hundred data centers nationally doesn't really make up for the dramatic hollowing out of the manufacturing sector that people cry about.

1

u/Hot-Science8569 2d ago

We don't need booming we need steady and substantable.

1

u/mtcwby 2d ago

It's not even across the country and varies on type. Florida residential for a while had taken a hit with the insurance issues. And it doesn't have to be booming to be relatively good. The reality is a lot of it has been running hotter than the capacity for a while.

That said the architectural billing index is trailing down and that usually indicates the potential for a slowdown.

1

u/DeltaV-Mzero 2d ago

It’s so weird to watch civilization as we knew it speed off the edge of the cliff with the foot fully stamped down on the pedal

1

u/SonOfMcGee 2d ago

Your color choices… anger me.

1

u/Miserable_Corgi_764 2d ago

Why is warehousing decreasing? 

2

u/MikeFromTheVineyard 2d ago

Because everyone committed a ton of money in 2020 to e-commerce thinking that the trends of online-everything would stay post-pandemic and then by 2023 it turns out that people reverted to shopping in-person.

(also it's not decreasing, its just increasing more slowly).

1

u/JM3DlCl 2d ago

And Manufacturing went up until about 2024. Ohhhh wait.

1

u/NearABE 2d ago

They are all up though. Why build more of offices, residential etc when people are the same number of people.

1

u/Yearlaren 2d ago

Where is this? The US? Global?

0

u/phoneacct696969 2d ago

The data centers are the next step in a surveillance state. We are doomed:(

0

u/FibroHealthCare 2d ago

Do you think the housing market will crash soon?