BRICKS & BYTES BULLETIN
INTELLIGENCE FOR CONSTRUCTION LEADERS

THIS WEEK
Data Center Planning Drops – Is the Boom Starting to Fade?

Planning slows for the first time in months, the UK build gets pricier, and AI’s price floor is about to fall through the floor.

THE EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
THIS WEEK’S KEY TAKEAWAYS

Full episode write-up at the bottom↓

Key Takeaway 1:

The data center pullback reached the pipeline. The Dodge Momentum Index fell 1.9 percent in June as data center planning cooled, and cancellations are stacking up, with Prince William County’s 22-million-square-foot Digital Gateway dead after five years of local opposition. Planning is still up 21.8 percent year on year, so this is the first soft month, not a collapse, but it landed where the pressure was already building.

Key Takeaway 2:

Building in Britain has never been more expensive, or more precarious. Arcadis put five UK and Irish cities in the global top fourteen for build cost, then cut its 2026 UK forecast from 1.7 percent growth to a 2.5 percent contraction. Energy running 10 percent above pre-conflict levels and 50 percent steel tariffs landing this month will both show up in your tenders.

Key Takeaway 3:

AI’s price floor is about to fall. Moonshot publishes Kimi K3’s open weights on July 27, and open models already carry 29 percent of traffic on one major routing platform. The prize is cheaper tools, yes, but more so the ability to run models on your own machines, keeping your tender logic inside the building.

7 THINGS WORTH YOUR ATTENTION
ON THE RADAR THIS WEEK

  • CII Annual Research Conference, Denver (US) – Jul 20-22, includes a Data Center Projects Forum. (More)

  • Sunbelt Builders Show, San Antonio (US) – Jul 22-23, regional show for homebuilders and trades. (More)

  • IENXPO and ASEAN Tools Expo, Bangkok (Thailand) – Jul 22-24, engineering and industrial tools showcase. (More)

  • AGC Safety and Health Conference, Minneapolis (US) – Jul 22-24, the sector’s top safety event. (More)

  • 7×24 Exchange WiMCO Tech Summit, Texas (US) – Jul 21-23, focused on data center operations. (More)

  • Advancing Data Center Construction Texas, Dallas (US) – Jul 22-24, timely given this week’s pullback. (More)

  • ICCSGE Conference, London (UK) – Jul 26, structural and geotechnical engineering research meets industry. (More)

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FULL EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
Data Center Planning Drops – Is the Boom Starting to Fade?

Jake Browning plays quarterback for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers and also co-owns Sutter Street Demolition in Los Angeles. We were curious to know what the NFL taught him about running a construction business, and his answer was about handling pressure. His tolerance for chaos is basically unbreakable now, because whatever goes wrong on a demo job stays on the demo job. In his words: “The person going to watch LA does not give a shit about our demo job, but they care if the Rams did well.”

A man who gets blitzed on national television calls running a demolition contractor the quieter part of his life. Keep this in your mind, as this week’s updates paint a different picture. The sector everyone doubled down on is showing its first cracks, the priciest cities to build in got ranked, and the AI price war reached the point where the product might soon be close to free.

Watch: The NFL Quarterback Who Turned a $30,000 Truck Into a Demolition Company

Data centers: the pullback moved up the funnel

Last week we walked through the gap between what hyperscalers have announced and what has steel in the ground: $650 billion committed for 2026, a build already slipping, gear lead times stretching into years. This week the softness moved one step earlier, into the pipeline itself.

The Dodge Momentum Index fell 1.9% in June to 271.7, down from May’s upwardly revised 277.1. Commercial planning dropped 6.8%. Dodge put the fall down to data center planning moderating from what Sarah Martin, Dodge’s Director of Economic Research, called “extraordinary levels.” The index tracks projects entering planning and leads nonresidential spending by a year to 18 months, so June’s reading carries fewer data centers into the future.

Cancellations tell the same story more bluntly. In Prince William County, Virginia, the Prince William Digital Gateway collapsed after Compass Datacenters walked away and Blackstone’s QTS withdrew its final appeal on July 2, killing a campus that would have run to roughly 22 million square feet. Financing plateaued, and demand held.

What broke it was a court finding that the county had skipped proper notice before rezoning, backed by five years of organized local opposition. At least 14 US states are now weighing limits on new digital infrastructure. These projects keep dying at the planning table because the neighbors say no.

Nevertheless, these developments don’t make it a complete collapse. Three numbers in June provide a more honest perspective:

  • Planning up 21.8% year on year, even after the monthly dip.

  • Institutional work up 10.9% in June across healthcare, government, and recreational projects.

  • Twelve-month backlogs for contractors holding data center work, against eight months for everyone else.

One soft month after a run like this comes as a breather. It is still the first pullback after months of gains, and it landed exactly where the pressure was already building. It’s worth asking yourself this week: how much of your forward workload keeps running at last year’s pace, and have you stress-tested the version where it doesn’t?

Read: Big Tech Promised $650 Billion in Data Centers. Most of It Isn’t Being Built

What it costs to build, and who gets to build it

Arcadis published its International Construction Cost Index this week, ranking 100 cities by build cost. Geneva tops it, followed by London, Zurich, Munich, and Copenhagen. Further down, the list turns into a UK reunion: Bristol at nine, then Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, and Cardiff close behind.

Half of the fourteen most expensive places on the planet sit in the UK and Ireland, while the cheapest of the hundred, Bengaluru, comes in below a seventh of London’s level. Cardiff, among the twenty priciest markets on earth, has nothing to do with London wages, and yet it’s driven by the British system: regulation, labor scarcity, energy, materials, and the speed at which anyone decides anything.

The forecast is where it gets serious for your P&L. Arcadis cut its UK outlook for 2026 from roughly 1.7% growth to a 2.5% contraction, with new-build output already down 6% year on year in Q1 and housing and transport infrastructure hit hardest. The causes are familiar ones: affordability, viability, clients too slow to commit.

Two newer pressures sit on top, inflation from the Gulf conflict and the rate cuts that were penciled in for this year and have quietly been erased. Both land in your tenders: energy is running about 10% above pre-conflict levels, and the 50% tariffs on imported steel arriving in Europe and the UK this month will let domestic producers raise prices behind the wall, with the buyer footing it.

The report’s strongest point is aimed at clients. Contractors are pivoting hard into data centers, energy, and utilities because that is where the work is, and Arcadis warns that by the time commercial and residential demand returns, the supply chain may have moved on, leaving clients to compete for contractor capacity. Its route to becoming a “client of choice” is three practical commitments:

  • Share real inflation as it happens, so you stop paying risk premiums for problems that may never arrive.

  • Fund early materials procurement so the supply chain can lock in prices.

  • Get the basics right, clean orders and prompt payment.

The power balance is shifting, and good contractors are starting to choose whom they work for. If you commission buildings, it is worth knowing whether you are someone they would choose.

Geneva remains the world’s most expensive city in which to build

The AI price war just changed shape

The pricing battle we covered in June has a third player now. Where it stands on independent testing:

  • Fable 5 (Anthropic) still leads on raw capability.

  • GPT-5.6 Sol (OpenAI) sits close behind, at a fraction of the measured cost per task.

  • Kimi K3 (Moonshot) trails the American pair by a couple of points at the lowest price of the three and publishes its full model weights openly on July 27.

“Open weights” is the phrase that most executives aren’t sure about, so here it is in construction parlance. Renting top-tier AI has worked like hiring an excavator: the machine stays in the rental yard, you pay by the hour, they set the rate, and they can raise it or refuse you outright. An open-weight release gives you the fabrication drawings and tells you to build your own. Run the model on your own computers, and both the hourly rate and the off switch disappear.

For a construction executive, two consequences follow. Cheap, capable models drag the price of the paid ones down. More importantly, a model running on your own machines keeps your data inside the building. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, put a sharp version of the same warning to every company using AI this week: you pay twice, once in money and again in the proprietary knowledge you must feed the model to make it useful.

Every prompt your estimators write and every correction they make teaches the model how your business works. His phrase: “Every correction is distilled into institutional know-how.” His advice is to keep ownership of your data and be able to switch providers so you are never locked in.

Take that with a pinch of salt. Open models already accounted for 29% of the traffic through one major AI routing platform last month, so the switch is happening with or without his blessing. His prescription also happens to end with you buying more of Microsoft’s cloud, which does not make him wrong, only far from neutral.

The question for your own shop is narrower and more urgent: when an estimator pastes tender logic into a chatbot to speed up a bid, where does that logic go, and do your vendor terms say who is allowed to learn from it? Most executives we ask have no idea.

Read: Construction Robotics in 2026: 4 Workflows Where Robots Are Actually Working on Construction Site

Robots on real sites, and a quarterback who knows when to slow down

Two funding rounds this week put robots on live sites, both paid on delivery:

  • Monumental (Amsterdam) raised a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures. Its robots have laid brickwork on 100 homes across four commercial sites. It bills as a subcontractor, carries full liability, and puts humans in when the autonomy falls short. The founder’s logic: contractors want a subcontractor who delivers, and no one wants to own the technology.

  • TerraFirma (two ex-SpaceX engineers) raised roughly $115 million led by Kleiner Perkins. It retrofits excavators, dozers, and loaders into semi-autonomous machines run from screens. Its pitch leans on a Goldman Sachs figure: US construction labor productivity has fallen 0.6% a year since 1965, while the wider economy grew 1.6%.

Then there is the interesting combination of Jake’s NFL background and Sutter Street’s business philosophy. Jake has been cut four times in the NFL, and it taught him to keep his earning floor above zero. So Sutter Street turns down work that would grow it too fast.

An athlete with every reason to chase the flashy thing, he has the acumen to grow a demolition sub slowly in a trade where overextending early kills more contractors than anything else. His read on winning work will land with any GC; in the NFL they tell you to monetize your brand. In construction, the bar is “Are you normal? Can you show up on time?”

A food for thought, this Monday: how much of your forward workload leans on the data center surge holding, and what do your numbers look like if June was the top and not a blip?


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