Turner & Townsend has released its annual global Data center construction cost index for 2025–2026.
The index for 2025 shows a 5.5 percent increase in the cost per watt of building a traditional cloud-based, air-cooled data center. This is markedly lower than the 9.0 percent year-on-year increase reported in the firm’s 2024 report. A large factor in this is the broader cooling in construction market cost inflation, as reflected in the Global construction market intelligence report for 2025, which showed an average rate of 4.2 percent inflation across the whole construction sector.
In North America, active under-construction capacity is now at least 60 percent higher than a year ago, while vacancy rates remain near historic lows at l
