Data center construction is booming in the United States. According to Oxford Economics, data centers made up just 5 percent of office construction spending in 2014. By 2024, the number had reached 32 percent. Demand for data centers continues to grow, with the construction market projected to increase from $83.97 billion in 2025 to $154.49 billion by 2031, based on a report from Research and Markets.
Texas is home to some of the largest data center construction projects currently underway. Owner Crusoe Energy has assembled a team that includes DPR Construction, Southland Industries, and Rosendin to develop two data centers in Abilene and Amarillo/Claude, Texas.
Upon completion, the two West Texas sites will total approximately 9.5 million square feet. When the third phase at the Abilene site is completed in December 2027, it will provide 1.5 gigawatts (GW) of power. Amarillo will deliver 1 GW upon completion in August 2027. The campus will include 10 buildings in Abilene and six in Amarillo.
Rosendin is a 107-year-old, 100 percent employee-owned company and the largest privately held electrical contractor. The company performs just under $10 billion worth of electrical contracting work annually in the United States. Justin Tinoco, President of Rosendin, estimates that nearly 70 percent of the company's current work is data center related.
The company has been doing data center work for a few decades. When Rosendin first began working on data centers, the largest projects provided only 2 megawatts of power.
Tinoco forecasts that Texas will become the world's leading data center hub by 2030. The growth in the overall market made Rosendin particularly interested in joining Crusoe on the West Texas data center construction projects.
“We knew from the initial conversations that started off at 100 megawatts that this project was going to be different,” Tinoco said. “The current numbers — it has never been done before at that speed or scale.”
Between the two Crusoe sites that Rosendin committed to, there are currently 9.7 million square feet of data center space under construction. Rosendin is currently committed to 12.7 million square feet of data center construction in West Texas alone.
Mega projects can be exciting; they draw press and dignitaries who wave and make statements at the groundbreaking. But for those involved in actual construction, a mega project often presents challenges that require innovative thinking.
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In the rapidly expanding Texas data center market, the number of staff needed to construct the Abilene and Amarillo/Claude data centers was substantial.
“We've peaked at about 1,800 craft workers on the Abilene project alone, and [we will] be employing over 4,000 craft workers on the West Texas job sites alone,” Tinoco said. “We leveraged our enterprise resources and were able to pull staff from all over the United States to come in and staff up this project. We currently have craft from 37 different states represented on our work in West Texas. We knew that growing this quickly, we needed to double down on our people and focus heavily on safety and craft development programs. We needed to show these new employees that we really prioritized their well-being, and it’s paying off big time.”
The team has taken an innovative approach to the design and construction of the data centers.
“It’s been a great partnership between Rosendin, Southland Industries, DPR Construction, and Crusoe,” Tinoco said.
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Instead of the traditional contracting methodology, consisting of the MEP, mechanical, and electrical subcontractors underneath the general contractor, the team created a multi-prime approach that reports directly to the owner.
“The atypical method allowed us to clean up the whole process, move fast on design, mobilization, and eliminate a lot of waste,” Tinoco said. “We were able to leverage our services at the Rosendin Holdings company level and leverage what we feel are a lot of our true differentiators in the market.”
Rosendin and Southland are serving as the design-build contractors on the facilities.
“This allowed the three prime contractors to do what they do best and divide and conquer,” Tinoco said. “It takes a real special type of owner to allow the contractors to move this fast. There was an extreme amount of trust and confidence shared between the owner and the primes.”
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Using this method, the mechanical and electrical teams — a significant part of data center construction — were able to keep design in-house. These moves sped up the process.
The projects started with an intense design process, according to Tinoco.
“We had some initial conceptual designs,” he said. “And once that got rolling, we developed a permanent set of drawings, the basis of design that they can go sell and lease out within months.”
The job in Abilene started in late July 2024, just five months after the team was formed. The team expects to open the first two phases of the project, totaling 830 megawatts, in December 2027. That time frame would be unprecedented for data center construction.
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“This wasn't just twice as fast as any other data center deployment, but more like three or four times faster than what anybody is doing in the market, let alone at this scale,” Tinoco said.
Other factors had to be worked out to ensure the data centers met the schedule. One major holdup in many construction projects since the COVID-19 pandemic hit has been the supply chain issues.
“Crusoe had a very robust and aggressive supply chain process, and they were having gear delivered at scale, and [it] was on site waiting for our electricians to go install it,” Tinoco said. “This automatically drives more efficiencies when contractors are not waiting on owner-furnished equipment.”
Rosendin developed 60 percent of the necessary electrical infrastructure through Modular Power Solutions, a wholly owned subsidiary of Rosendin, headquartered in McKinney, Texas. This dramatically reduced labor needs on site.
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“It’s an example of just-in-time delivery,” Tinoco said. “We’re able to plug and play and streamline the delivery and scheduling process.”
Another factor that helped the project stay on schedule was the city of Abilene. Their permitting process was very short, so the team has not been held up by bureaucracy.
Using the multi-prime approach to project delivery, DPR Construction, Southland Industries, and Rosendin formed a partnership built on collaboration, responsibility, and trust.
“We worked hard on kind of establishing our swim lanes as a multi-prime. ... In the very beginning, we put a great emphasis on a collaboration agreement that established responsibilities, so really it was almost like an integrated project delivery mindset,” Tinoco said. “We're all going to fail or succeed together.”
This project delivery method required the owner to be on board for the unique arrangement.
“We had an owner that saw value in what we provided and had a tremendous amount of trust in the process,” Tinoco said. “They wanted to see that it was fully thought through, but then they released us and gave us their full support to move forward with the plan.”
Tinoco believes that this process can be replicated on other projects.
“We're replicating this with some other owners,” he said. “This has changed how data centers are built and how they're sourced. People are looking at data center construction differently. What this job has proven is that getting your key trade partners committed early is valuable. It allows processes to be streamlined, bureaucracy to be minimized, and sacred cows to be eliminated.
“There are certain things people hold on to traditionally, either through design or through general construction methods. As soon as you can get rid of that and challenge the business ... it takes a special owner that's willing to change.”
Data center construction has grown by leaps and bounds over the past half decade or so. The West Texas data center projects have set a path and established a precedent for future projects. Construction can be safe, efficient, and quick when teams take ownership.
- Owner: Crusoe Energy, Denver, Colorado
- Prime Contractors: DPR Construction, Santa Clara, California; Rosendin, San Jose, California; Southland Industries, Grapevine, Texas
- Architect: Alfatech, San Jose, California
- MEP Engineer of Record: Rosendin and Southland Industries
- Electrical Contractor: Rosendin
- Mechanical Contractor: Southland Industries
