The AI Construction Boom Is Hiding in Offices

If you are looking at the headline data in the government’s economic report, it is easy to miss the artificial intelligence investment boom.

Take this morning’s construction spending report. 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.