Good morning, Construction Pros.
This week, a 659-foot industrial tower started climbing in Virginia, job openings hit a 10-month high while hiring cratered to an all-time low, and a federal court rewrote the rules on prevailing wages for material suppliers.
- World record in Virginia. LS GreenLink started vertical construction on the globe's largest continuous vulcanization tower today, kicking off elite work for structural and millwright trades in Hampton Roads.
- A split labor market. 298,000 openings, an all-time-low 3.5% hiring rate, and a quit rate at a 9-year floor. Two different construction industries are operating right now.
- Davis-Bacon shrinks. A Texas federal court permanently vacated three Biden-era prevailing wage rules covering material suppliers and delivery drivers. Your bids on public work just changed.
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📊 MARKET PULSE
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Construction Job Openings
298,000
+32K MoM · 10-month high
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Hiring Rate
3.5%
Matches Feb 2026 all-time low
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Quit Rate
1.3%
Down from 1.7% · 9-year low
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Construction Unemployment
4.1%
+0.3pp MoM (CPS, NSA)
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Copper LME Spot
$13,170/MT
-5.7% MoM · +40% YoY · 50% tariff
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Steel Mill Products (PPI)
348.5
+2.1% MoM · +6.7% YoY (WPU1017)
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Nonres. Input Prices
+9.7%
YoY (May 2026) · +2.4% in month
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Diesel (National Avg)
$4.668/gal
-$0.16 WoW · +$0.94 vs June 2025
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LABOR PULSE
This is a buyer's market for general labor and a seller's market for specialized trades, at the same time. Contractors are laying off residential and warehouse crews while hoarding electricians, pipefitters, and HVAC techs for data center builds. Workers know it: a 1.3% quit rate is a 9-year low, which means your crew is stable but they're also watching the premium jobs closely. If you're a foreman with specialized skills, you hold leverage right now. If you're staffing a general commercial project, your bench is available, but recruitment costs for specialty trades will sting.
THE TAKEAWAY
Nonresidential inputs are up 9.7% year-over-year and copper is still 40% above where it sat 14 months ago, even with June's pullback. Section 232 now applies to the full customs value of imported metal articles, not just the metal content, so your tariff exposure on wiring and conduit is structurally higher than it was in 2025. If you are bidding any work with copper-heavy electrical scopes today, your escalation clause needs a trigger that references LME spot plus the Section 232 full-value calculation. Lock in material buyouts on metal-intensive scopes before the next move up.
🏗 THE BIG MOVES
TeraWulf Tops Out a 750 MW AI Hub on a Former Coal Plant
TeraWulf topped out the structural beam for Building CB4 at its Lake Mariner campus in Somerset County, New York, a roughly $1 billion conversion of a decommissioned coal plant into a 750-megawatt AI and high-performance computing hub backed by Google-affiliated entities and sovereign wealth funds. Electrical Builders, Inc. is executing mission-critical welding and medium-voltage electrical work, installing high-voltage bus duct systems that replace coal-handling infrastructure with the dense, high-current power delivery AI servers demand. Energization targets Q3 2026, and CB5 breaks ground immediately after, sustaining a continuous multi-year workflow for inside wiremen and pipefitters across Upstate New York.
$975M Project Helios Begins Interior Fit-Out in Northern Virginia
Blue Owl Capital closed $975 million in balance-sheet financing for Project Helios, a fully leased, investment-grade data center in Prince William County, Virginia, developed by CorScale Data Centers and Affinius Capital, as the building transitions from core-and-shell into full interior deployment. The 400-plus workers heading in will spend months pulling cable, installing complex switchgear, and commissioning high-density server halls for an undisclosed cloud tenant, with no downtime between phases. Northern Virginia's data center corridor is already saturated for MEP trades, so subs should expect regional premium wages and the need to draw crews from across the Mid-Atlantic.
Stak Energy Proposes $500M Arctic Data Center on the Dalton Highway
Stak Energy is advancing a land lease with the Alaska Department of Natural Resources for a $500 million, one-square-mile, three-gigawatt AI data center on the North Slope, targeting the Arctic's 12-degree average ambient temperature as a natural free-cooling resource to cut operating costs for AI workloads. The entire facility will be elevated on five-foot engineered gravel pads to prevent permafrost thaw, creating highly technical, high-wage work for heavy civil contractors, pipeline welders, and structural riggers comfortable in extreme remote climates. A reported seven-year supply backlog on natural gas turbines is the primary risk, but if logistics resolve, rotational camp-based work for Pacific Northwest and Alaska trades could begin as early as late 2026.
🔦 PROJECT SPOTLIGHT
CIVIL STRUCTURAL MILLWRIGHTLS GreenLink Starts the World's Tallest Continuous Vulcanization Tower in Chesapeake, Virginia
LS GreenLink commenced vertical construction today on a $681 million subsea cable manufacturing facility in Chesapeake, Virginia, anchored by a 201-meter (659-foot) continuous vulcanization tower that will become the tallest structure in Virginia and the largest VCV facility in the world.
Getting to vertical construction required extraordinary foundation work: subcontractor Site Prep, Inc. executed a lime stabilization program at 27 lb/SY to depths of four feet across the entire 100-acre brownfield footprint, then drilled nearly 2,000 shafts, with 325 concentrated directly beneath the cable-winding structure, using eight drilling rigs running simultaneously. Ironworkers and crane operators are now executing complex, high-elevation lifts to assemble the heavy steel framework that will support vertical cable-extrusion machinery, followed by millwrights installing the continuous vulcanization tubes inside the completed tower.
WHY IT MATTERS
This is the first facility of its kind in the United States, and it directly removes a critical supply chain bottleneck for the domestic offshore wind industry: high-voltage direct current subsea cables currently have to be imported. For structural trades in Hampton Roads, this means a prolonged, high-wage environment as iron and crane work climbs to 659 feet and specialized millwright demand builds throughout 2027.
Phase 1 completes in Q4 2027, with full operations beginning Q1 2028. Watch Hampton Roads for ironworker and millwright demand to spike as the steel frame reaches full height over the next 18 months.
⚡ QUICK HITS
Three Davis-Bacon provisions vacated. A federal court in the Northern District of Texas permanently struck down three Biden-era rules that extended prevailing wages to off-site material suppliers and delivery drivers on public works projects. The AGC backed the challenge and DOL declined to defend the provisions, so this ruling stands as final.
Pell Grants now cover trade certifications. Starting July 1, federal Pell Grants can be applied toward 8-to-15-week trade programs in welding, plumbing, and HVAC. Aspiring apprentices can now fund fast-track certifications without personal debt, which should widen the entry-level pipeline into union and open-shop trades.
Sonderling nominated for Labor Secretary. President Trump nominated Keith Sonderling, currently acting deputy secretary, to lead the Department of Labor. Sonderling favors voluntary employer self-audits over aggressive jobsite enforcement, which means field wage-and-hour checks are likely to stay cooperative rather than confrontational under his leadership.
Bouygues buys Vannoy Construction. French conglomerate Bouygues Construction completed its acquisition of Vannoy, a North Carolina GC with 873 million euros in 2025 revenue across seven southeastern offices. Regional field personnel gain access to a multi-billion-dollar global parent and a broader institutional project pipeline, especially in healthcare, education, and high-tech commercial.
Hudson Tunnel funding permanently secured. A Southern District of New York judge permanently blocked the DOT from withholding federal funds for the $16 billion Hudson Tunnel Project, ruling the administration's freeze bypassed due process and violated grant regulations. Heavy civil crews on the nation's largest rail infrastructure project have no stoppage risk going into the second half of 2026.
🔢 ONE NUMBER
Construction job openings at the end of May 2026, a 10-month high driven almost entirely by demand for data center electricians, while general commercial hiring hit an all-time low.
🔧 THE TOOL
This week's AGC Data Digest flagged the Architecture Billings Index at 44.5 for May 2026. Any reading below 50 means architecture firms are billing less work, and that translates to fewer nonresidential construction starts 9 to 12 months from now. That lag is predictable and you can use it. If you are an estimator or PM, treat a sustained ABI below 50 as your signal to front-load pipeline submissions and lock in subcontract backlog now, before bid volume thins and GCs get more aggressive on margins. Check the ABI monthly on the AIA website at aia.org. When it has been below 50 for two or three consecutive reports, your window for building backlog on favorable terms is closing fast.
📚 FURTHER READING
Construction Dive: Construction job openings hit 10-month high in May - the clearest explanation of why 298,000 openings and an all-time-low hiring rate can exist at the same moment.
Construction Dive: Judge permanently bars DOT from blocking Hudson Tunnel funds - a landmark ruling on federal funding stability for multi-state P3 infrastructure projects.
A 659-foot tower broke ground today, input costs climbed 9.7%, and labor split into two different markets. Reply and tell us which end of that split you are on right now. 🏗
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