A security manager at a general contractor told me recently, “We just got a big data center. They want us to go digital. We don’t have it. We don’t have it in English. We don’t have it in Spanish.”
From conversations I’ve had with GCs over the past couple of years, I know they’re not the only ones. And it’s not because these companies don’t have a commitment to security. Most have been executing complex, multi-subcontractor projects well for decades. But what “good” looks like now is changing, especially for clients commissioning these types of builds.
The compliance bar has changed
Data center construction starts in the United States hit $77.7 billion by 2025, up 190% year over year.. ConstructConnect is tracking 76 projects valued at more than $88 billion that will begin in the next six months alone. Owners financing these builds are raising the bar on every GC they carry.
Five years ago, pre-qualification meant a low EMR, insurance certificates and references. In today’s critical builds, that means digital audit trails, verifiable orientation logs for each worker, site-specific safety plans reviewed by the owner’s safety team before anyone is mobilized, and daily PTPs accessible on demand.
A contractor shared a story that captures how costly a single missed requirement can be. The owner’s site safety manual stipulated that their safety representative should be notified four weeks in advance of any critical lift. The requirement was buried in the email during pre-mobilization and was never put into effect. By the time someone caught him, the crew was already in place and ready to go. The owner returned four full weeks.
This is a materially higher bar than any commercial contractor has ever faced. Managing these requirements across dozens of subcontractors at a 500-person site requires real operational capability. And right now, that capacity is scarce.
The problem of the labor force aggravates everything
The Estimates from associated builders and contractors the industry needs 350,000 net new workers in 2026, rising to 450,000 in 2027. The National Center for Education and Construction Research Projects 41% of the current workforce will retire by 2031. Good safety directors and superintendents are not evenly distributed across the industry. They are being pulled upstream to the more demanding and higher paying projects.
In a hyperscale data center with up to 500 workers, you might have a security manager in charge of the load. I’ve spoken to safety directors who manage 700 subcontractors through pre-mobilization, manually gathering documentation and sending it to the owner’s safety team for review, pending approval.
With $40.92 average hourly earnings in construction as of March 2026this is an expensive way to spend an expert’s day.
And there’s a retention issue underneath. If you ask your staff to spend their day chasing paperwork instead of managing security, you’re giving them a reason to go somewhere that has better tools and systems to support them.
What winning contractors are doing differently
GCs who keep pace have discovered that paperwork doesn’t have to go through the office. They have pushed the property into the field. The competent person in each crew, such as the foreman, is responsible for orienting his people, presenting pre-task plans and applying for permits for high-risk activities. The data flows from the play rather than being chased from a trailer.
At any time of the day, the super can see who is on site, which crews are fired, what has been dispatched. This is how you manage a site of 500 people without adding to the number of admins.
What I find most interesting is what happens next
After a GC creates these workflows for a data center contract, the operations team starts using the same system in their business projects. Safety leadership sees the visibility they now have in construction and wonders why they don’t have it everywhere. Project teams on healthcare and industrial constructions adopt the same workflows because the documentation burden is just as heavy there, even if the client does not yet require a digital proof.
In one quarter, what started as a response to one customer’s requirements has become an operating standard for the entire company.
ASSP Construction Safety Challenges 2025 Report found that 38% of companies still do not operate with a proactive approach to security and compliance. This figure will move because the clients who commission the most valuable works in the country have already decided what the floor will be like.
Contractors who have experienced this floor on data center projects carry it with them. That’s probably the most lasting thing about the mission-critical boom: not just new revenue, but a set of operating habits that will determine where they go next.
