Everyone in commercial construction knows the data center boom is real. What doesn’t get talked about as much is what the inside of these buildings actually requires, and how much is riding on the specialty interior work getting done right.
To put the scale in context: the Stargate Project has committed $500 billion over four years to new AI infrastructure across the United States. That’s one initiative. There are currently 76 data center projects tracked to break ground in the next six months, valued at over $88 billion, already 13% more than all of 2025. Equipment World
These buildings have real performance demands on the interior
Most of the public conversation about AI data centers focuses on power and cooling. Those are massive scopes, but they aren’t the whole picture.
Data centers carry some of the most demanding interior requirements in commercial construction. Fire-rated partitions, floor and ceiling assemblies and firewalls designed to stop fire from spreading between (data halls and mechanical areas) server buildings are non-negotiable. Structural ceiling grid systems need to support new busways, cable trays and power distribution as GPU workloads push rack density higher. Raised access flooring must be specified for constantly evolving equipment loads and installed correctly to manage airflow and cable routing. Acoustic performance matters between server rooms and occupied spaces. Wall systems and exterior cladding carry their own performance requirements throughout. National Gypsum
These aren’t finish selections. They’re systems where a wrong call has downstream consequences for how the building performs.
The schedule pressure is unlike most commercial work
AI facilities carry more cooling demand, electrical complexity, sensitivity around system coordination and less tolerance for avoidable mistakes than a conventional build. That bleeds into every scope on the job, including the interior.
When access flooring, wall systems, aisle containment, coatings and ceilings (both structural and standard acoustical) all have to sequence inside a building where mechanical and electrical are already running tight, coordination gaps aren’t a minor inconvenience. They’re schedule risk. And on a data center project, schedule risk is money in a way that’s hard to overstate.
Projects that don’t account for labor competition from AI infrastructure are already seeing underbudgeting, delayed delivery and increased execution risk. The teams winning this work are the ones who come in with a structure that reduces friction rather than adding to it. Construction Owners
One partner across every interior scope
Bonitz self-performs flooring, wall systems and ceilings, and partners with specialized subcontractors for cladding, access flooring, coatings and other specialty scopes.
In data center work specifically, that means bringing multiple flooring solutions, acoustic solutions, aisle containment systems and exterior cladding under the same contract; scopes that individually have real performance requirements and collectively create coordination risk when they’re split across multiple subs.
The same thing that makes multi-scope contracting valuable on a commercial interior makes it valuable here. One project manager, one point of contact managing all scope submittals, one call when a sequencing question needs an answer before it becomes a delay.
A net 57% of contractors surveyed in the AGC’s 2026 Construction Outlook expect data center spending to increase this year, the highest of any category. The interior work inside those buildings needs a partner who can keep pace and own the outcome. Equipment World
If you have a data center project coming up, reach out. We’d love to talk through what we can bring to it.
