The AI data centre rush is raising alarm over the construction supply chain’s ability to cope, writes Leon Wright of Turner & Townsend
For data centre developers and operators, speed to market is absolutely critical. These are major investments on typically very large parcels of land – so enabling swift access for customers is essential both from a revenue perspective and a reputational standpoint. The highly competitive nature of the industry is enhanced by the fact customers have the freedom to choose a new location elsewhere in the world if one market is unable to deliver the goods.
At the same time, the factors developers must consider are ever more complex – and delivery programmes are often becoming delayed. Public and political concerns about overdevelopment and local impact are increasingly hindering planning processes. Access to necessary water and power via state utility providers, discussed earlier in this report, can now take years, not months – leaving operationally ready centres standing empty.
Given these other complexities and delays, it’s vital that the construction elements of the delivery programme are as streamlined as possible.
Access to power remains top challenge
As highlighted in Turner & Townsend’s recently published Data Centre Construction Cost Index for 2025, access to power remains the top challenge for data centre projects achieving committed schedules.
But our survey findings also raise several other key hurdles, with most focused on construction – including the impacts of design changes during works, equipment delivery issues, regulatory delays and labour availability.
The majority (58%) of survey respondents said critical equipment delivery was delayed more than 10% of the time. Some 21% went further, saying delays are “more often than not” or “consistent”. While 62% were at least moderately confident in the supply chain’s ability to meet critical equipment delivery dates in the year to come, that still leaves a significant portion concerned.
To manage and mitigate these risks, alongside other areas of the construction programme, there has been a significant increase in the role of project controls in the data centre sector. A key component of this is schedule management, which has become indispensable to the sector, with clients increasingly adopting schedule management processes.
To this effectively, clients should be looking to:
- Develop pre-construction schedule templates covering the full lifecycle of the project, with each template covering how the scope of current and future designs can be executed with a balance of speed to market and realism.
- Implement enterprise schedule software, which can offer a single, central, accessible hub for supply chain scheduling that better enables reporting and management of benchmarks.
- Adopt schedule risk management to more accurately quantify uncertainty and risk within the schedule templates. This will give greater confidence that forecast dates are realistic, pinpoint where mitigation activity is required and determine the right amount of schedule contingency to build into the plan.
- Run regular scenario planning sessions to quantify the impact (both good and bad) to float, critical path and the completion date for changes such as design, equipment lead-in and process improvements.
These approaches enable informed decisions to be made earlier, allow for evidence-based negotiations with stakeholders and more time to be invested in protecting delivery.
For clients with global and regional programmes, there can be a benefit to moving to a programme management office (PMO) approach – with a real focus on centralising systems and processes to enable consistency of services within projects and to benefit from economies of scale. As an example, by centralising procurement and enabling larger bulk contracts with major suppliers that can provide equipment globally.
Review procurement and contracting models
Regardless of the scale of a client’s operation, a review of procurement and contracting models should be a high priority. In a fast-moving market, this may allow better screening out of suppliers who have failed to deliver in the past or, more positively, can be used to grow more collaborative relationships with suppliers and contractors.
Using models that share risk in a balanced way can lessen the communications gap between client and contractor – and make it more likely that potential issues down the track are identified, raised and discussed together at an earlier stage.
In the data centre sector, Turner & Townsend is also seeing greater use of so-called “multi-prime” contracting for projects, where several “prime” contractors are appointed to projects to manage different aspects reflecting their expertise.
This is often enabled by the owner engaging a project management consultancy (PMC) to provide independent oversight and manage coordination of the activities.
This model helps balance and share risk, as well as take advantage of available talent and capacity in a local market more effectively. Making this work requires a high degree of upfront local knowledge to understand the regional market of suppliers and where their strengths lie.
The post Spotlight on schedule: Delivering data centre construction at pace appeared first on Planning, Building & Construction Today.
