AI infrastructure work just added $8.8 billion to construction management fees in a single year

The ENR 2026 Top 100 Professional Services Firms rankings, published in the June 22 issue, put a hard number on what construction managers at data center projects already knew: this is the most lucrative CM/PM-for-fee market on record.

Combined revenue for the Top 100 professional services firms hit $36.9 billion in 2025 — up 31.2% from $28.1 billion the prior year. That's roughly $8.8 billion in new construction management revenue generated in a single year. Program management-for-fee firms grew faster, climbing 35.7%. Construction management-for-fee firms came in at 25.1%. International work grew even harder — up 63.4% to $12.7 billion — as hyperscalers export their buildout to Europe and Asia-Pacific.

The ENR data identifies the driver directly: the telecommunications and data center sector grew 31.3% for CM/PM firms between 2024 and 2025, and is up nearly 87% since 2023. Microsoft, Meta, Alphabet, and AWS are committing capital at a pace that outstrips their internal project management capacity. Turner Construction reported record revenue in 2025, with data center work as the primary factor.

What "owner-side PM" means on these projects

PM-for-fee and CM-for-fee firms work for the asset owner, not the contractor. They select the GC, manage the overall program, oversee schedule, and hold the owner's budget accountability. The boom in this model is a signal: hyperscalers are sophisticated capital allocators, but they're deploying too fast to manage every project themselves. They buy that capacity from specialized CM firms.

For GCs bidding on data center work, the counterpart across the table is no longer a first-time internal owner's rep. It's a CM firm that manages dozens of these projects simultaneously — which means structured bidding, disciplined document control, and tight turnaround expectations on RFIs and submittals. GCs winning this work are the ones that can operate at that pace, not just build fast.

The constraint isn't opportunity — it's people

ENR's coverage is explicit about where the ceiling is: it's headcount, not backlog. Firms can only win and deliver as much work as their people allow. Specialized PM talent — people with data center project history, digital project controls experience, and familiarity with mission-critical commissioning sequences — is the scarce resource.

That creates two separate situations for construction firms:

If your firm already has data center experience, your people are your competitive position. A project team with data center credentials opens doors that general GC relationships and bonding capacity alone don't. The market will keep rewarding that specific resume stack for at least the next two to three years.

If you're a CM or GC firm without it, the gap is widening faster than most firms realize. The Top 100 firms billing $36.9 billion collectively aren't growing at 31% because they're broadly excellent — they're growing because they built specific capacity for a specific type of owner with non-negotiable delivery expectations.

The AI connection is direct

The data center wave isn't a real estate cycle. It's an AI infrastructure race. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind, xAI, and their customers need physical compute — the kind measured in megawatts of cooling and hundreds of megawatt-hours of electrical capacity — and they need it faster than the grid and the construction industry can comfortably supply it. Every hyperscaler has accelerated capital commitments into 2026 and 2027, even as individual states like Illinois and New York have started restricting new builds.

The ENR rankings are a lagging indicator — they reflect 2025 revenue reported in mid-2026. But the forward signal is consistent: this market doesn't slow until AI compute demand does, and there's no evidence of that.

The read

The 2026 ENR Top 100 Professional Services Firms data is a market map. It shows which sectors of construction management are growing, by how much, and why. PM-for-fee firms grew 35.7% in a year. If you're setting a sector strategy, recruiting for the next two years, or deciding where to invest training and equipment relationships, that number is a useful gut-check.

The money moved. The firms that built capacity ahead of this wave are billing 31% more.

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Construction AI Brief covers how the AI market reshapes the commercial construction landscape three times a week. The data center build-out is one of our standing focus areas.