Twelve months. World’s largest AI supercomputer.

This issue is about that. And what it tells us about every project getting awarded right now.

01 · AI & TECH

“A nail gun doesn’t make a bad carpenter better.”

That was Alan Espinoza on Tuesday morning. He was opening ENR FutureTech 2026. The room was full of Top 400 CIOs.

“A nail gun doesn’t make a bad carpenter better; it just makes him make the same mistakes faster.”

Three numbers backed it up. 95% of corporate AI pilots fail. $88 billion lost a year to construction rework. 96% of construction data goes unused.

His point: don’t buy more tools. Fix the workflow first, then layer AI on top.

Read the GlobeNewswire recap

02 · MARKET & POLICY

A transformer takes longer to deliver than a building takes to build.

Wood Mackenzie put numbers on it this week. Lead times for substation transformers used to be 140 weeks back in 2023. They’re over 160 now. Three years for a piece of grey steel.

Why? Data centers. US capacity is going from 24 GW to 100 GW by 2030. They’ll soak up 40% of all electrical equipment demand in the country.

So if an owner asks about your project schedule, ask back about their gear. Because the gear sets the schedule. The design follows.

Data Center Knowledge breakdown

03 · CONSTRUCTION & DESIGN

After 144 years, Sagrada Família finally gets a roof.

On June 10, the basilica in Barcelona inaugurates its eighteenth and final spire. The Tower of Jesus Christ. 564 feet tall.

The date isn’t an accident. June 10 is exactly 100 years since Antoni Gaudí got hit by a tram and died. The church was less than a quarter built. Most of his drawings burned in the Spanish Civil War a decade later.

Everything since has been a reconstruction.

One project took 144 years. The deep dive in this issue is about a project that took 122 days. The space between those numbers is the whole conversation about what we’re doing here.

Sagrada Família official site

Run this on a named client before any go/no-go meeting. The output isn’t a deck. It’s the questions a competing firm won’t think to ask in the interview.

You are a pursuit strategist for an AEC firm.
Research [CLIENT ORG] over the last 24 months. Produce:
1. Three strategic priorities their leadership has stated publicly. Cite source.
2. Two recent wins or completed projects they have announced.
3. Two recent losses, delays, or public criticisms.
4. Names of decision-makers who spoke at conferences or published in the last 12 months — with what they talked about.
5. Three questions a competing firm is unlikely to ask in the interview, but should.
Use only public sources. Cite each. Flag anything you can’t confirm as “unverified.”

It pushes past the RFP and into the friction points, the unaddressed criticisms, and the small public moments that show what the client is actually working on.

A million-square-foot warehouse in Whitehaven, South Memphis used to make refrigerators.

It was bought in March 2025 for $80 million and operational by January 2026. Two months later, 41 gas turbines were running across the state line in Mississippi. Six miles of cabling carried the power back with 200,000 NVIDIA chips at the other end.

When it’s fully built out, Colossus 2 will be the largest AI training cluster on Earth. Over a gigawatt of compute. Delivered in roughly twelve months!

The lawsuits over Colossus 1 are still being filed.

How is that even possible?

Reuse the box. The site was an old Electrolux factory. No envelope to design, no curtainwall to spec, and the year of architectural conversation goes away. What’s left is industrial fit-out.

Bring your own power. The Memphis grid had eight megawatts and xAI needed two hundred. So they trucked in mobile gas turbines. The kind utilities stage after a hurricane and they ran them as a “temporary” power plant. By April 2025, drone footage showed 35 of them on site, but only 15 had permits. The Southern Environmental Law Center sued.

Cross the state line, if needed. When Tennessee tightened regulations, xAI bought a former Duke Energy plant six miles south. That site is in Mississippi and they greenlit 41 turbines there in March. The SELC and the NAACP filed formal protests, but the permits went through anyway.

Use batteries as shock absorbers. 168 Tesla Megapacks sit on site and they smooth out the gaps when grid power isn’t reliable.

A workaround stacked on a workaround stacked on a checkbook.

Who wears the consequences

The American Lung Association already gave Shelby and DeSoto Counties an “F” for ozone. That was before any of this.

The SELC says the Southaven turbines could put out 1,700+ tons of NOx a year. That would make them the largest industrial source in greater Memphis.

The speed has a cost and someone is paying it, but they didn’t get asked.

What this means for the rest of us

You aren’t competing for Colossus 3, but the playbook is leaking out.

I’m hearing the same questions in pursuits now. Can we reuse an existing shell? Can we bring our own power? Can we phase this so something is generating revenue before everything is finished?

Adaptive reuse used to be a sustainability talking point. Now it’s a procurement strategy. Behind-the-meter generation used to be niche, but now Equinix has 20 microreactors on order from Radiant. Phased commissioning isn’t optional anymore.

“We’ll deliver your beautiful purpose-built building in 36 months” is losing to “we’ll get you generating revenue in 12, then iterate.” The firms that can tell the second story without losing the engineering rigor — those are the ones winning right now.

Colossus 2 isn’t a model anyone should copy because the community costs are real and the lawsuits are real. But the velocity bar moved a long way, and it’s not moving back.

That’s why a 144-year basilica and a 12-month gigawatt cluster end up in the same newsletter. Somehow they’re now in the same industry.

Sources: Data Center Dynamics (Mar 31, 2026); Southern Environmental Law Center filings; SemiAnalysis. Verify all permit status and lawsuit timing against current filings before publishing.

What it is: AI feasibility for early-phase real estate. You draw a parcel. Set the zoning and parking. TestFit spits out thousands of buildable layouts in seconds. Multifamily, mixed-use, industrial, increasingly data centers. With unit counts, FAR, parking ratios, and rough cost takeoffs.

Where it shines: In a developer pitch. Architects pull it up live in the meeting. They show three viable schemes in fifteen minutes, with pro-forma numbers attached. Some users say they’ve won $750K in fees on projects they wouldn’t have chased otherwise. Yield numbers come within 10–15% of formal feasibility. Close enough for go/no-go.

Where it falls short: Small irregular urban lots confuse it. The output is a yield study, not a design. You still need an architect for the architecture. And Site Solver starts at around $8,000 a year and that’s a real number for a small firm.

Verdict: USE IT — IF YOU CHASE DEVELOPER WORK

Not sponsored. Free trial through their sales team. Check current pricing on testfit.io.

Try TestFit

AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2026

San Diego Convention Center · June 10–13, 2026

About a month from now, every architect you know is going to San Diego. 350 sessions. The biggest expo in the industry. The AIA Firm Award.

If you’re in marketing or BD, the one session built for our crowd is “AI vs. Reality: Trust, Perception & Differentiation in Architectural Communication.” The Small Firm Exchange’s AI session is also worth your time. You’ll leave with a usable starter kit.

Skip a keynote if you have to but don’t skip the open studios. That’s where the real conversations happen.

Advance pricing closes June 9.

Register here

Two listings this week. Verify the apply links are still live before you click — these things move fast.

Want to list a role with us? Hit reply.

That’s Issue #4.

If something here was useful, forward it to one person who needs to see it.

If something was wrong, hit reply.

- AEC Wire

AEC Wire · aecwire.com

A museum opened in Los Angeles last Sunday. It’s over one hundred feet long, made out of concrete, and cantilevered over Wilshire Boulevard.

The crazy thing—it can slide five feet sideways.

Peter Zumthor designed it. SOM engineered it. Clark Construction built it. Fifty-six of some of the biggest base isolators ever manufactured sit underneath it. In a real earthquake, the whole building moves and the people inside barely feel a thing.

This is the kind of project that reminds the industry what it can build.

Here’s Issue #3.

01 · AI + TECHNOLOGY

Trimble just bought the AI that reads your contracts.

On April 2, Trimble announced it’s acquiring Document Crunch.

Document Crunch is the AI that reads construction contracts and flags the stuff you’d otherwise miss at 11pm the night before signing—payment traps, notification windows, and indemnification clauses your firm wouldn’t touch on a good day.

Already deployed on 10,000+ projects, it has an impressive list of clients including Balfour Beatty, Barton Malow, andDPR.

It’s also the third major contech AI deal this spring. Autodesk closed its Rhumbix acquisition on April 2 (same day). Procore bought Datagrid back in January. The big three are all buying AI companies—fast.

The next shortlist you’re on, at least one competitor will have contract-risk AI bundled into their Trimble stack.

Construction Dive breakdown

02 · MARKET + MONEY

The ABI is 0.2 points from positive. For the first time in three years.

March Architecture Billings Index: 49.8.

The growth threshold is 50.

That’s the closest it’s been since early 2023. Backlogs are at 6.6 months — the healthiest since December 2023. The West flipped positive for the first time in over a year.

Now read the other number. Design contracts just declined for the 25th straight month.

Translation: firms are billing hard on work they already signed. What they’re winning now is still shrinking.

“Billings could soon see positive growth for the first time in three years… ongoing economic and geopolitical challenges pose significant risks to recovery.”
— Richard Branch, AIA Chief Economist

If your 2027 BD plan is built off a 2025 backlog, you’re already late.

Read the AIA release

03 · PROJECT + BUILD

The LACMA building that can slide five feet.

Zumthor is 82. This is his first built work in the United States.

900 feet of concrete spanning Wilshire Boulevard. Ten towers holding it up withantilevers reaching 80 feet.

$720 million. 8,600 workers on and off site. It opened to members April 19 and will open to the public on May 4.

But the real story isn’t the size, it’s what’s underneath. Scroll down.

Read SOM's engineering breakdown

Scenario: You’re targeting a municipal water authority. The RFP hasn’t dropped. You’ve got 12 months of board minutes, the adopted budget, the CIP, and local press coverage.

Analyze the attached documents from [Water Authority]: 12 months of board minutes, FY26 adopted budget, current 5-year Capital Improvement Plan, and the last 6 months of local press.

Ignore what the formal RFP criteria would be. I want the three things this client is MOST worried about that will NOT appear in evaluation criteria — political pressures, budget anxieties, inter-agency tensions, community concerns.

For each of the three:

1. The concern in one sentence.

2. Evidence across the documents — cite meeting dates, budget line shifts, press quotes.

3. How a consultant could credibly speak to that concern in a pre-RFP meeting, without it sounding like positioning.

Be specific. If the evidence is thin on a point, drop it.

Asking AI to summarize the RFP tells you what the client wrote. This tells you what they didn’t.

The building that moves

How SOM got a 900-foot concrete museum to survive an earthquake by letting it slide 5 feet.

Last Sunday, a new museum opened in Los Angeles. The David Geffen Galleries at LACMA spans 900 feet of concrete over Wilshire Boulevard — six lanes of traffic, roughly 50,000 cars a day moving underneath it.

Beneath the whole thing sit 56 seismic base isolators. If a fault line decides today’s the day, the building slides — up to five feet in any direction. The art stays on the walls. You barely feel it.

Welcome to the David Geffen Galleries.

How did we get here?

Back in 2009, LACMA decided its old galleries had run their course. They hired Peter Zumthor to reimagine them. He’s a Swiss architect, Pritzker Prize winner, famously deliberate, and at the same without a completed building in the United States.

Zumthor drew something that pushed boundaries.

One building. One floor of galleries. Raised 30 feet in the air on concrete towers. Spanning across Wilshire Boulevard with no expansion joints, no interruptions, ust one continuous 900-foot floor of art.

“Sounds unbuildable” is the correct first reaction.

SOM got the job of making it buildable.

The earthquake problem

A California building that’s concrete, 900 feet long, ando joints.

Any structural engineer reading that list is already wincing. Big concrete buildings deal with seismic forces the way cars deal with speed bumps: you slow down and break the trip into pieces. Expansion joints. Control joints. Shorter spans.

LACMA and Zumthor said no. The art floor had to read as one room.

So SOM made the building float.

All 900 feet of it sits on 56 base isolators — 40 primary ones at the corners of the ten towers, plus 16 smaller ones supporting the ground-floor program. Each primary isolator weighs 40,000 pounds, its dish over nine feet in diameter, manufactured in Vallejo and trucked down one at a time.

Think of each one as a giant pendulum. A friction pendulum, technically. The building sits on the pendulums. The pendulums sit on the foundation.

During an earthquake, the ground does what the ground does. The pendulums flex. The building up top moves — but slowly, smoothly, and not very much relative to itself.

Five feet in any direction. That’s the designed movement.

The art stays on the wall because the wall and the art are moving together, as a single unit, riding on top of the isolators. It’s the same trick an aircraft carrier uses to land planes in rough seas. The deck moves. The plane doesn’t notice.

The shrinkage problem

With the earthquake problem solved, then there’s another problerm.

Concrete shrinks as it cures. On a 900-foot continuous pour with no expansion joints, unaddressed shrinkage would tear the building apart before the opening ribbon gets cut.

SOM’s answer was post-tensioning.

After the concrete sets, steel cables running through every slab, rib, and wall get pulled tight from the ends. The cables squeeze the concrete back together as it tries to shrink away from itself.

360 miles of cable in one building is impressive

Then they split the pour into more than 100 distinct concrete placements, modeled in sequence for months. Each placement had to cure at the right time, in the right relationship to the ones around it. The base isolators at the ends were freed early during construction so the building could inch around as it cured — sliding about 1 to 1.5 inches at each end, exactly as the engineers had predicted.

The building moved while it was being built. Then it was designed to move again, on demand, whenever the Pacific Plate feels like it.

And the concrete itself is new

Standard structural concrete uses portland cement. Portland cement has an embodied carbon problem the industry has been chasing for two decades.

SOM subbed in alternatives. Custom mixes across the building.

The finished structure uses 20% less energy than the ASHRAE baseline for museums — a category where climate control is life support for the art, not a nice-to-have.

Why this matters

The final cost was$720 million with 8,600 workers on and off site performing 2.3 million total work hours. Consultants include Clark Construction as GC, Largo Concrete, Buro Happold, KPFF, AECOM, Simpson Gumpertz & Heger, Seele, Geosyntec, Fehr & Peers, and ACCO.

The architecture press is covering the galleries, the travertine, the Rothkos. Fair enough, but the amazing piece of work is the building. and here’s what it says to the rest of the industry.

A building like this doesn’t exist in a delivery model where everyone’s playing defense. Somebody trusted the structural engineer when she said put the whole thing on rubber pucks. Somebody trusted the architect when he said no joints. Somebody trusted the GC when the pour sequence went from “handful” to “one hundred plus.”

That trust doesn’t get built in a proposal. It gets built long before in conversations, in past projects, in technical people who can still tell a client we can do this and mean it.

The AI tools showing up in this issue are going to change a lot about how AEC firms pursue work, but they’re not going to change that.

The Geffen Galleries are a reminder of what the pursuits are for.

Document Crunch

Most construction AI summarizes documents. Document Crunch reads contracts for what’s missing. Flags the clauses that don’t match. Finds the notification windows buried on page 214. Checks your subcontract flow-downs against the prime. It’s deployed on 10,000+ projects.

Shines: pre-award contract review and subcontract pass-through checks.
Limited: it’ll find the clause, not tell you what to negotiate for instead.
Verdict: Try it. Trimble just bought it. Pricing will likely change.

49.8 — March 2026 AIA Architecture Billings Index. Highest since early 2023. 25 consecutive months of contract declines underneath. (AIA)
6.6 months — Average firm backlog. Highest since December 2023. (AIA)
53% — A&E firms using AI tools, up from 38% year over year. (Deltek Clarity, 697 firms)
349,000 — Net new workers US construction needs in 2026. 456,000 in 2027. (ABC)
11.8% — US average effective tariff rate as of April 8. Highest since the early 1940s. (Yale Budget Lab)
10,000+ — Construction projects running Document Crunch before Trimble bought it. (Construction Dive)

The Artificial Intelligence Show — The Human-to-Machine Writing Scale

86,000 people took the New York Times’ AI writing quiz. Most preferred the machine. Paul Roetzer uses the result to introduce his human-to-machine writing scale and asks the question that actually matters: not whether AI can write, but when should we let it?

Three takeaways that map onto AEC marketing:

The public can’t tell AI writing from human writing anymore. Neither can your selection committee. “We’ll just make sure it sounds like us” stopped being a differentiator last year.

Atlassian cut 1,600 roles and cited AI. The same conversation is happening behind closed doors at firms across industries..

Pick a point on the scale and say it out loud. Firms avoiding AI and firms hiding their AI use are making the same mistake — no stated position. A written policy on what your firm writes and what it automates is becoming a recruiting signal.

Listen Here

AIA Conference on Architecture & Design 2026

June 10–13 · San Diego Convention Center

Seven weeks out. Advance registration closes June 9.

Go for: AI vs. Reality: Trust, Perception & Differentiation in Architectural Communication. Finally, a session asking whether AI in your pursuit narrative costs you trust with clients who can spot it.

Skip: The first-day business-of-architecture sessions if you’ve been before as they can be repetitive. If you haven’t gone before though, go.

Real work: Brand receptions on the Gaslamp. That’s where principals are candid about which sectors they’re actually pulling BD budget from.

Register here

Want to list a role with us? Hit reply.

That’s Issue #3.

If this was useful, forward it to the structural engineer on your team. The LACMA deep dive is for them.

- AEC Wire

AEC Wire · aecwire.com

The PwC U.S. CEO told the Financial Times this month: “Employees who think they can opt out of AI are not gonna be here that long.”

That’s not a tech CEO. That’s the head of one of the Big Four firms that audits the largest engineering companies in the world.

Meanwhile, ACEC’s latest sentiment survey shows 45% of engineering firms have zero AI implementation. Not early-stage. Not piloting. Zero.

And on the other side, nearly half now have a formal AI strategy and more than half are hiring dedicated AI talent.

The industry isn’t adopting AI as a whole, it’s split in half over it. This issue is about that splitand what it means for the firms caught in the middle.

Here’s Issue #2.

01 · AI + TECHNOLOGY

Revit just learned to answer questions. In English. Inside your model.

On April 7, Autodesk released Revit 2027 with an embedded AI Assistant. Not a plugin. Not a chatbot you alt-tab into. It sits inside the modeling environment and answers natural language questions about your project.

Ask how many exterior walls use a specific assembly. Ask it to generate a Dynamo graph. Ask what changed between versions. It answers in context, using your project data.

The release also connects Revit to Autodesk Forma for real-time carbon analysis during design. And underneath: Autodesk completed its acquisition of Rhumbix—a field data platform capturing labor and production data in real time. Turner, Suffolk, and DPR are customers.

For your next shortlist or interview: “We use a design tool that answers questions about the project in plain English” is a capability a selection committee understands.

What's New in Revit 2027

02 · MARKET + MONEY

U.S. utilities just committed $1.4 trillion. That number is real.

Fortune reported April 14 that U.S. investor-owned utilities have increased five-year capital plans by 27%+ to at least $1.4 trillion through 2030. Duke Energy leads at $103 billion. NextEra at $94 billion. The South accounts for $572 billion.

The primary driver is AI and data center electricity demand. But aging infrastructure, grid hardening, and electrification are all compounding. ConstructConnect projects power infrastructure starts will hit $27.8 billion in 2026 - nearly double last year.

For context, WSP’s $3.3 billion acquisition of TRC Companies in February created the largest power engineering platform in the U.S. That deal happened because power engineering talent is the scarcest commodity in the industry.

$1.4T utility spending

03 · FIRMS + MOVES

Three Utah engineering firms quietly merged last week.

On April 10, Spectrum Engineers, Colvin Engineering, and Envision Engineering merged to form Lynk Engineers; a ~245-person MEPT firm in Salt Lake City. No private equity. No press tour.

Three firms that collaborated for decades on the Salt Lake City International Airport, deciding quietly that independence is a liability. MEPT firms are in extreme demand for data center and mission-critical work. PwC says U.S.-targeted AEC M&A surged 66% in H2 2025.

Explore the Merger

Scenario: Your leadership team needs a 10-minute market briefing. You have ACEC’s Q1 2026 data.

I’m briefing my firm’s leadership on market positioning for 2026–2027. Here are findings from ACEC’s Q1 2026 Engineering Business Sentiment Survey (628 executive responses):

— Economy confidence: +45 (up 11 pts). Forward: +3.

— Data centers at net +89. Energy +78. Gov buildings, education, transit softened.

— 91% cite political uncertainty. 45% have no AI implementation.

— 9/10 firms have open positions. Half turned down projects due to staffing.

Build a 10-min briefing: (1) Where to concentrate pursuits for 18 months? (2) What changes in hiring? (3) Biggest backlog risk + mitigation? Be specific. Use the data. Don’t hedge.

This works because it gives AI structured data and asks for strategic interpretation — not a summary.

The 45% Problem

Nearly half of engineering firms have no AI strategy. The other half is pulling away.

A principal at a 90-person structural firm told me his leadership team spent four months debating ChatGPT licenses. Four months. By the time they approved it, two of his best PMs had been using it on personal accounts for a year—drafting RFIs, summarizing notes, prepping for client calls. The firm’s official AI strategy launched six months after the actual adoption had already started without permission.

That story is so common it’s almost not a story. But the data behind it is.

ACEC’s Q1 2026 sentiment survey — 628 executive responses — found nearly half of firms now have a formal AI strategy. That sounds like progress until you read the other number: 45% report no AI implementation at all. Not early-stage. Zero.

“Employees who think they can opt out of AI are not gonna be here that long.”
— PwC U.S. CEO, Financial Times

The Artificial Intelligence Show podcast published its Q1 trends briefing April 7. Their polling: 55% of workers use AI “a few times a month, rarely, or never.” 65% cited fear and resistance as the single biggest AI challenge. Not cost. Not technology. Fear.

Host Paul Roetzer: “The organizations that are really struggling here often lack CEOs who have presented a clear vision for the future of work.” That’s not a technology failure. It’s a leadership failure.

ACEC’s workforce research: the U.S. faces an annual shortfall of roughly 18,000 engineers — 184,000 leave, 166,000 enter. The college-age population shrank 3.3% in a decade. More than half of ACEC member firms reported turning down projects because they can’t staff them.

“We talk about the AI revolution as if it’s inevitable — it isn’t. It will only go as far as the engineering beneath it.”— ACEC Research Institute

AI can’t work without engineers. Engineers can’t keep up without AI. The firms that understand this as a single problem — not two line items, one for IT and one for HR — are building something durable. The ones treating AI and talent as separate projects are watching both problems get worse.

The question isn’t whether to adopt AI. That debate is over. The question is whether your leadership is willing to say it out loud. Because 45% of firms haven’t answered that yet. And the distance between them and the firms that have is growing every quarter.

Procore Agent Builder

Most construction AI answers questions. Procore shipped one that takes actions. Their Agent Builder (open beta) lets teams build custom AI agents inside Procore — no code. Three pre-built agents: Draft RFI, Daily Log, Submittal Review. These draft documents, pull from drawings and specs, and route for review — inside the system.

Shines: firms on Procore losing hours to RFIs and dailies.
Limited: agents only work within Procore’s ecosystem.
Verdict: Try it.

+89 — ACEC net sentiment for data centers — highest of any sector (ACEC Q1 2026 Sentiment)
45% — Engineering firms with zero AI implementation (ACEC Q1 2026)
91% — Firm leaders citing political uncertainty as top risk (ACEC Q1 2026)
$1.4T — Utility capital spending through 2030, up 27% (Fortune)
18,000 — Annual gap — engineers leaving vs. entering (ACEC Research Institute)
3.1% — U.S. hiring rate Feb 2026 — lowest since COVID (AI Show Ep. 208)

The Artificial Intelligence Show — Ep. 208: Q1 Trends Briefing

Paul Roetzer and Mike Kaput distilled 150+ Q1 topics into a top-10. Three that map to AEC:

The “People Problem” — 65% of orgs say fear is #1 AI barrier. Mirrors ACEC’s 45%-with-nothing finding.

AI-Driven Layoffs — Atlassian cut 1,600. Block cut ~4,000. The PwC quote that opens this issue came from this episode.

The Vibe Shift — Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) entered mainstream discourse. Anthropic’s CEO predicted 2026–2027. That’s why $630B in hyperscaler CapEx exists.

AGI 2027??

ACEC Annual Convention & Legislative Summit

May 3–6, 2026 · Washington, DC

Two weeks out. Where CEOs sit with the people writing infrastructure policy.

Go for: The Sentiment briefing. Data centers at +89 vs. softening government work reshapes your pursuit calendar.

Get dressed up for: The ACEC Engineering Excellence Awards (EEA) Gala is the anchor.

Real work: Capitol Hill visits. At 91% political uncertainty, face time with staffers is intelligence gathering.

Register Here

Want to list a role? Hit reply.

That’s Issue #2.

If this was useful, forward it to the person at your firm still debating AI licenses.

- AEC Wire

AEC Wire · aecwire.com

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

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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