The Tennessee Titans’ new Nissan Stadium, under development by Turner Construction and AECOM Hunt, is helping Nashville along the path of becoming a titan itself.
“The stadium is intended to position Nashville to attract global events while serving as a long-term civic and economic asset for the region,” said Mike Gallagher, Project Executive, Turner Construction.
Designed to maximize sustainability and preserve energy and water, the new football stadium will replace the current open-air stadium of the same name. The project promises to deliver a modern fan experience with improved amenities, views, and technology, including contactless payment and concession stands for shorter wait times; 77,000 square feet of video screens; 44 escalators; 33 elevators; enhanced comfort in a climate-controlled environment; and the largest rooftop bar in America, looking out over the Nashville skyline.
At 1.8 million square feet, the 60,000-seat stadium is designed as a year-round, multi-purpose venue for Titans games, Tennessee State University football, major events, and community use. The stadium is also expected to attract some of the world's most popular mega-events and manufactured entertainment — a goal that has already come to fruition, with its recent selection to host the Super Bowl LXIV (64) in 2030.
“Turner and AECOM Hunt have a longstanding history of building stadiums together,” Gallagher said.
Local businesses, labor, and goods are also being prioritized in construction and vendor contracts.
“Tennessee Builders Alliance, comprised of Turner, AECOM Hunt, and two other local contractors (Polk & Associates and ICF Builders) are a part of our team on this,” he added.
Considered to be the most expensive publicly funded stadium in the NFL, the enclosed $2.1 billion project is funded through a public-private partnership, including contributions from the Tennessee Titans, the state of Tennessee, and Metro Nashville.
It sits alongside the East Bank of the Cumberland River, bringing with it a 30-year lease term and making Nashville the Titans’ home for at least another generation.
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Founded in 1960 as the Houston Oilers, the team moved to Tennessee in 1997 and were renamed the Titans by their original owner, Texas oil magnate Bud Adams. The new name was a nod to Nashville’s classic architecture, full-scale replica of the Parthenon, and the city’s nickname, “Athens of the South.” The team is now owned and led by Bud Adams’ daughter, Amy Adams Strunk.
The new stadium property returns riverfront acreage back to the city, which has its sights on developing a profit-generating new riverfront designed for Nashville’s residents.
Long known as America’s go-to destination for honky-tonk/country music, Nashville has also transformed over the last decade into a booming economic center.
The city’s metro population was estimated at 2.23 million in May 2026, and its gross domestic product (GDP) grew from roughly $109 billion in 2016 to an estimated $226 billion today, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). The Nashville metro area is expanding due to corporate relocations (notably from Amazon, Oracle, and Meta), population influx, and a resilient labor market.
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BEA also ranked the Nashville metro area as second among the country's 100 largest metro areas across seven metrics, including unemployment rate, labor force growth, and per capita income, placing just behind Raleigh, North Carolina.
“In 10 years from now, it'll be really exciting to see the East Bank further developed, and it's really going to transform the city for the locals, as well as for the visitors,” Gallagher said. “It's going to change the overall skyline.”
The project originally broke ground in 2024 and topped out in 2025. Currently, construction efforts are focused on the non-retractable, high-tech, ETFE translucent roof — a major component of the project.
“The roof is a unique system and is a major part in the overall success of the project,” Gallagher said. “Right now, we're in the process of lifting the cables for the roof.”
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The overall cable-supported system forms a 38-foot by 38-foot grid, with secondary steel reducing that to a 12-foot by 12-foot grid. The grid will be infilled by a lightweight pillow cushion system of inflated membrane panels supported by air handler units. The system connects back to a compression ring, along with creating a span that covers the entire playing field and the majority of the seating bowl. By the time of publication, the cables are expected to be lifted, with the final cables pinned to the compression ring.
“The scope of the overall ETFE roofing system doesn't finish up until end of September, beginning of October,” Gallagher said.
According to Gallagher, Liebherr LR 1300 Crawler Cranes are in use around all four sides of the building to lift and position the roof cable system. There are also additional cranes inside the bowl and jacking equipment on the roof to pull the strands and raise the cables up into place.
Interior finishes are also starting to progress.
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“There's interior mock-up suites that have been completed as well, and we're getting to the stage in construction where interior finishes are starting to ramp up,” he said.
Gallagher mentioned that at the beginning of the project, the construction team consisting of Turner, AECOM Hunt, ICF Builders, and Polk & Associates sat down together to discuss lessons learned from prior experiences. The team of experts then incorporated those ideas into their operational approach to inform and determine how they were going to successfully execute the new Nissan Stadium project.
“One of the big things is leveraging resources, knowledge, and experience,” he said. “It's leveraging the internal Turner Engineering Group resources, the geotechnical abilities to review site conditions and existing conditions to make sure we're setting up for an overall successful approach coming out of the ground. That's one of the major risks with starting a construction project.
“That was something that was talked about at length when we started this project — to make sure that we had a sound and operational approach for that. We were able to successfully execute it, achieving our structural steel top out two weeks ahead of schedule.”
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Another important aspect of the project, according to Gallagher, is the team’s use of drones and newer technology with cameras, as well as AI technology to review 360 walks. The team then compares that information to the same areas from the prior day to develop Key Performance Indicators, helping to create the project projections and the overall project schedule.
“One of the cool things about being on a project like this is the ability and the interest within the overall construction industry to try out and leverage new and innovative technology,” Gallagher said.
“One of the ways that it's helping,” he added, “is the older way of doing it would be someone walking and hand marking up drawings or elevations and dating what was installed, doing a takeoff then, and manually calculating out how many pieces of glass or metal panels or quantity of material was installed.
“Whereas utilizing AI and some of the overall technology, that's automatically done. It puts it in a nice visual format as well. It also puts in a portion where it correlates and pulls it into our overall 3D model, so you can visually see it on a screen or through a model. So the historical way was doing it on 2D plans, and now it's more leveraging technology to be able to view it in a 3D format.”
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“We have great trade partners on this project. It's been a priority since the beginning of this job,” Gallagher said. “We want to stand out with our overall job site culture, so there's been a lot that has been done to try and attract workforce, and making sure that they are showing up to a job that they enjoy working at every day.”
One of the key priorities for Turner Construction is safety, and Gallagher praised the success of the project team. He mentioned that the Total Recordable Incident Rate safety rating for the Nissan Stadium project is 0.68, which is considered excellent, indicating a highly effective safety program that significantly outperforms the general industry standard.
“There's been a huge focus on culture and safety,” he said. “Shout out to all trade partners and all workforce that have been involved in the project for making that a priority, because the people, and the craft, and everyone involved in this project are an extremely important asset. And their overall safety is most important.”
After the 2026 season ends, demolition will begin on the old stadium. The new stadium, over 75 percent finished as of this writing, is set to be completed in February 2027. The Titans are set to play their first game in the stadium in fall 2027.
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“We feel really good about our timeline, and we are on track to turn the stadium over early next year,” Gallagher said.
“The Titans won a lot of games in their current stadium and made a lot of great memories for their fans here in Nashville,” he added. “They've been great partners to us, and we expect they will win a lot of games in the new stadium as well.”
- Owner: Tennessee Titans
- General Contractor: Tennessee Builders Alliance (Turner Construction, New York, New York; AECOM Hunt, Indianapolis, Indiana; Polk & Associates, Nashville, Tennessee; ICF Builders, Nashville, Tennessee)
- Engineers: Walter P. Moore, Houston, Texas (structural engineer); Smith Seckman Reid Inc., Nashville, Tennessee (MEP engineer)
- Other Contractors: Baker Construction, Monroe, Ohio; W&W AFCO Steel, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma; Jones Bros, Mt. Juliet, Tennessee; Metromont, Greenville, South Carolina; ETS (Enclos Textile Structures), Dallas, Texas Editor’s Note: Part 2 of this story will run in the August issue, with more on the workforce development efforts that made this project possible.
