Skanska's $84 million Georgia award buys a shell and a clock

Skanska has signed an $84 million contract to build a 245,000-square-foot data center in Georgia for a client the Tuesday release describes only as existing and undisclosed. The scope carries five colocation halls and administration space, civil, structural, utility, electrical, mechanical, security, and fit-out work, sized for 48 megawatts, with the Stockholm-based contractor starting in November and expecting to finish in the third quarter of 2028.

Those figures yield two ratios: about $343 a square foot by area and roughly $1.75 million per megawatt by capacity. Neither describes an entire campus, since the announcement stops at construction scope and names no owner, site, utility, or tenant. The five colocation halls are a design for capacity sold in pieces rather than to a single occupant, so lease-up risk stays with whoever holds the asset and not with the builder signing for the shell.

As this publication has argued, data center shells are a schedule problem before they are a cost problem, and Skanska's own numbers have shown timber working as a schedule hedge rather than a savings play. Here the calendar carries the risk: 20 to 23 months between a November start and a third-quarter 2028 handover, which is where mill and switchgear queues land, and the client is buying that window, not the price. The client is an existing one per the release, implying a prior relationship and a repeat order of the sort contractors work to hold onto.

Georgia got the capacity, while the week's rulemaking happened elsewhere: the same roundup reports Virginia issued new data center rules and drew its data center line at 25 megawatts last week, with a disclosure ban and a 240-day rulemaking clock doing the heavier work of repricing the pipeline. A 48-megawatt build clears that line with room to spare, which suggests the next wave of capacity has reason to favor states that have not drawn one, and the roundup reports no comparable Georgia rule.

Power is the part of the award left blank: no utility, interconnection position or supply arrangement is named for the 48 megawatts, the scope covers electrical and mechanical rooms rather than electrons, and the underwriting document that decides which data center loads get financed is the one absent from this announcement. Watch for a utility filing, a named occupant or a second phase before the halls hand over in 2028.