The money is moving.
The sectors hiring right now? Data centers, energy infrastructure, advanced manufacturing.
The sectors where your BD team is still chasing the same six clients? Getting quieter.

Meanwhile, steel tariffs just hit 50%.
A $133 million mass timber tower went into foreclosure.
And AI is changing how firms operate so fast that a lot of leadership teams are still debating whether to buy ChatGPT licenses.

This newsletter is for the people inside AEC firms who are responsible for winning work and driving revenue.
Marketing directors. BD leaders. Proposal managers.
The ones sitting in the gap between “we should look into that” and “why didn’t we look into that sooner.”

No hype, just the information that impacts your actual work.

Here’s Issue #1.

01 · AI + TECHNOLOGY

AECOM just spent money on… people who understand AI? Revolutionary.

For two years, AEC firms have been buying AI tools like they’re Costco memberships. Licenses, plugins, pilots: the spending has been real.

AECOM did something different.
On April 1, the $16 billion infrastructure giant announced a partnership with SMU to fund doctoral fellowships focused on applying AI to infrastructure engineering.
Not a software deal.
Not a plugin.
A pipeline for humans who can actually make AI work on real projects.

The fellows get co-mentored by SMU faculty AND AECOM technical leaders on live commercial projects.
Translation: the research has to survive contact with an actual job site.

AECOM’s CEO, Troy Rudd, said it plainly: tomorrow’s infrastructure “requires more than technology, it requires people with the skills, vision, and leadership to apply it responsibly and at scale.”

Here’s the thing your firm should hear in that sentence: the bottleneck on AI in AEC was never access to tools.
It was knowing what to do with them.
The firms investing in AI literacy not just AI licenses, are about to look very different from the ones that didn’t.

AECOM × SMU announcement

02 · MARKET + POLICY

Steel is at 50%. I’m going to need you to sit down for this one.

The AGC updated its Tariff Resource Center on April 7. Here’s the damage:

Steel, aluminum, and copper items? 50% tariff.
Derivatives? 25%.
Industrial and electrical equipment containing those metals? 15%.

Not a forecast.
Not a projection.
That’s what’s already priced in.

Input prices for nonresidential construction surged at a 12.6% annualized rate in the first two months of 2026.
That’s the fastest since early 2022.
Aluminum mill shapes jumped 33% year-over-year. Steel? Up 20.7%.

If your BD team is pursuing data centers, healthcare, or airports; anything with serious structural steel or MEP scope, the estimate you wrote last quarter is already wrong.
The AGC’s advice is blunt: update your contracts before you sign anything new.

The clients who get this will thank you for flagging it.
The ones who don’t will blame you later.
Be the firm that flagged it.

AGC tariff data

03 · PROJECT + BUILD

The world’s tallest mass timber tower didn’t fall down. It ran out of money.

Milwaukee was supposed to make mass timber history. Again.

Neutral Edison was 31 stories, $133.3 million in financing, Passive House targets, 45% embodied carbon reduction.
It broke ground June 2025 and was going to be the tallest mass timber building on the planet.

Then in September, the developer stopped construction.
By March 2026, the GC: C.D. Smith filed suit for $11.3 million and is seeking foreclosure of the site.

What happened? Tariffs.
The Commerce Department more than doubled duties on Canadian lumber in 2025. Mass timber projects are especially exposed because North American CLT and glulam supply chains still depend heavily on Canadian mills.
The cost structure that made the project viable in 2024 simply didn’t exist anymore by fall 2025.

If your firm pitches mass timber as a sustainability differentiator and a lot of firms do right now - your cost narrative needs to address supply chain risk explicitly. Because selection committees are going to ask.
And they’re going to use this project as Exhibit A.

Full story

Scenario: Your firm is considering whether to pursue data center work for the first time. You need a fast competitive landscape read before the BD meeting Friday.
Pro tip: use “Deep Research” or your LLM’s equivalent to get a detailed view and thorough analysis.

I want to understand the competitive landscape for AEC firms pursuing data center construction and design work in the US. Using the search results, identify: (1) the top 5 AEC firms currently winning data center work and what specifically qualifies them — not just brand size, but technical capabilities like liquid cooling design, high-density power distribution, or mission-critical commissioning experience; (2) the 3 biggest barriers to entry for a mid-size engineering or architecture firm that has never done data center work; (3) the specific sub-scopes where smaller firms are finding entry points — civil site work, substation design, utility interconnection, fiber infrastructure — that don’t require a full hyperscale track record. Be specific about firm names and project examples. Do not give me a generic overview of the data center market.

The key phrase is “do not give me a generic overview.” Without that constraint, every AI tool will default to a Wikipedia-grade summary. This prompt forces it to produce intelligence you can actually use in a go/no-go conversation.

$3 Trillion Is About to Hit the Ground

The data center construction supercycle is rewriting which AEC firms win work and which ones get left behind.

Picture that you’re in a BD meeting.
Someone on the leadership team says “data centers.”
Someone else says “we don’t do that work.”
The conversation moves on to the healthcare proposal due Thursday.

That exact exchange is happening at hundreds of AEC firms right now.
And the firms that let it end there?
They’re going to look back at this moment the way firms that ignored design-build in 2010 look back at that decade.
Watching the market reorganize around them while they waited for the old work to come back.

So. Let’s talk about what’s actually happening.

Moody’s projects $3 trillion in global spending over the next five years on data center expansion and AI infrastructure.
Three trillion!
In the US alone, data center construction starts hit $77.7 billion in 2025; that’s a 190% increase year-over-year.

ConstructConnect is tracking 76 projects set to start in the next six months worth over $88 billion.
Meta just broke ground on a $10 billion, 1-gigawatt campus in Indiana.
The Stargate project: OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle has committed $500 billion across Texas, Ohio, and the Midwest.

These aren’t projections.
These are active construction programs.
Financing in place. GCs mobilized. Shovels in the ground.

The American Edge Project counts 4,149 active data centers in the US, with another 2,788 announced or under construction.
Building them requires roughly 4.7 million construction jobs.

Now here’s where it gets interesting for your firm.

Your instinct is probably: “that’s AECOM territory. Jacobs. Turner. DPR. We can’t compete with that.” And you’re right: AECOM has delivered over 11 gigawatts of data center capacity across 45 countries. You’re not winning that RFQ with a standard SOQ.

But here’s the part most BD teams are sleeping on: the work around the data center is often bigger than the work inside it.

Think of a hyperscale data center campus like an aircraft carrier.
Yes, the carrier itself is built by a small number of massive contractors.
But the port infrastructure, the fuel systems, the electrical grid connections, the water treatment, the civil engineering; that’s where hundreds of mid-size firms make a living. Same thing here.

Substation design. Utility interconnection. High-voltage transmission. Water and wastewater systems for cooling. Civil site work for hundred-acre campuses. Fiber infrastructure.
An AGC senior analyst put it directly: a significant share of the work is occurring around the data center rather than within the building footprint, creating opportunities for smaller civil, utility, and specialty firms.

The hiring pressure tells the same story. Data center construction is in the most aggressive talent cycle the industry has seen. MEP leaders, commissioning specialists, project managers with mission-critical experience; they’re already locked into 2026 builds. Schedules are slipping because the people aren’t available.

If your firm has people with power systems expertise, electrical infrastructure backgrounds, or high-reliability facility design experience, those people are worth significantly more today than they were two years ago.

Meanwhile, the sectors those firms used to live on? Softening.
The AIA Billings Index has been declining for three years. Backlogs are thinning.
Private commercial - starts outside of data centers - are flat or down.
The firms growing right now repositioned toward energy, manufacturing, and mission-critical. The ones that didn’t are competing harder for a smaller pool.

The question isn’t whether data centers are relevant to your firm.
It’s which piece of the ecosystem matches your capabilities.
And how fast you can build the track record.

Three trillion dollars is about to hit the ground.
Where your firm is standing when it lands is a choice you’re making right now, whether you realize it or not.

Microsoft Copilot

A marketing director asked Copilot to pull every data center project reference from her firm’s SharePoint. Organized by client, megawatt capacity, completion date.
Done in three minutes. Actually useful.
Then she asked it to write a capability statement for a hyperscale data center client.
It produced a paragraph so generic it could’ve been about literally any firm on the planet.

That’s Copilot in a nutshell.
Incredible at finding and organizing stuff that already exists in your systems.
Mediocre at anything requiring judgment about what makes your firm different from the next one.

Where it shines: internal search, meeting notes, pulling scattered project data into structured formats.
Where it face-plants: capability statements, cover letters, anything client-facing.
Its output quality is 100% dependent on what’s in your content library.
For most AEC firms, that library hasn’t been updated since the last website refresh.
Verdict: Use it; but invest in the content it draws from first. Garbage in, confident garbage out.

Amplify A|E|C - July 27–29, Las Vegas

SMPS retired the “Build Business” name, and this is what replaced it.
If your firm does marketing, BD, or proposals in AEC, this is the one conference built specifically for you; 850+ attendees in Columbus last year, and Vegas will be bigger. The Pinnacle Experience track is worth rearranging your schedule for if you’re a senior leader; it’s a curated, small-group format with peer exchange you won’t get from any mainstage keynote.

Some of the real conversations happen at the receptions and in the hallway between breakout sessions. Book your hotel before June 24 for the group rate. Get there Sunday night.

Register Here

Want to list a role with us? Hit reply.

That’s Issue #1.

If this was useful, forward it to one colleague in AEC who should be reading it. If something here is wrong, reply and tell me. Both are equally valuable at this stage.

- AEC Wire

AEC Wire · aecwire.com