Data center construction pipeline points capital to power and land

The North America Data Center Construction Market Report 2026-2031, published on ResearchAndMarkets.com and reported by IREI, projects the market growing from $85.23 billion in 2025 to $158.20 billion by 2031, a 10.86% compound annual rate. For private real estate investors, that figure is best read as a map of where development capital, land, and power are heading.

The report attributes the expansion to rapid investment in AI, cloud computing, hyperscale campuses, renewable-energy procurement, liquid cooling, and advanced power infrastructure, and it names Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, Equinix, Digital Realty, and Vantage Data Centers as operators continuing to expand their North American portfolios. Development is moving beyond established hubs into secondary markets with lower land costs, greater power availability, and friendlier regulatory climates, while Canada is emerging as a strategic growth market with abundant renewable energy, cooler temperatures, and rising AI infrastructure investment.

Geographic diversification is the report's stated market trend, and it is the part investors should underwrite; the market's value is set to rise by roughly $73 billion over six years, suggesting the constraint is deliverability rather than demand. Sites that can secure power, permits, and cooling infrastructure will be the scarce assets, and the five-year forecast is effectively a bet on which secondary and Canadian markets clear those hurdles first. For private capital, the construction pipeline is the leading indicator of stabilized-asset supply: buildings breaking ground today will be the income-producing properties hitting the market near the end of the decade, and their site selection will determine where competitive supply lands.

As this publication has argued in covering the $1.3 trillion data center debt club and Mapletree's test of the stabilized-asset bid, the underwriting that matters now reads like infrastructure. This forecast extends that logic to construction: sponsors who control land positions, substations, and transmission access will be the ones selling stabilized assets into the next cycle, while sponsors who simply chase concrete and steel will be competing at the margin. Data center construction has become a power-procurement business wearing a developer's hard hat, and the next deals are being made in power procurement offices, not construction trailers.