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If the AI data center boom ends, construction workers and banks will pay

Data center construction has carried much of America’s recent growth. Even a plateau in AI building would idle crews and saddle banks with losses

Anna Moneymaker / Getty Images

Kayla Caskey turned land her grandparents passed down into an RV park for the construction workers building Meta $META's $27 billion Hyperion data center, a campus going up in rural Richland Parish in northeast Louisiana. She knows the workers won't stay forever.

Before South Stuart RV Park could open, about 25 minutes from the site, Caskey had to get through zoning rules and put in showers and bathrooms. Its 12 spaces filled quickly, and this spring it was still getting inquiries every day. "It may just be land out there again," she told Fortune in March. "But hopefully, over the next couple of years, it'll pay off while the workers are still here."

Companies are pouring money into data centers like Hyperion faster than into almost anything else in the U.S. economy, and that spending now drives a large part of the country's growth. In August, private companies were building data centers at a pace of roughly $85 billion annually, 73% more than a year earlier, according to the Census Bureau's report released last week. Business spending on AI-related equipment, software, research, and data centers made up 39% of all U.S. growth over the first nine months of 2025, a bigger share than the same kinds of spending at the height of the dot-com boom in 2000, researchers at the St. Louis Fed calculated.

But in this case, growth comes from companies buying chips and pouring concrete for an AI movement that hasn't yet sold much of anything substantial. Three Federal Reserve Board economists who tracked AI's effects on jobs and productivity wrote in July that the evidence is "consistent with a buildout phase" rather than the start of widespread job losses. That leaves a big share of America's recent economic growth depending on companies spending more on AI every year. If they slow down, the tech companies won't be the only ones to pay. Construction crews would lose work, households would be left paying for power built to........

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