Spending on data center infrastructure has played a huge role in powering GDP growth. On its Wednesday earnings call, Nvidia's CEO estimated that this year alone, AI infrastructure spending will total $600 billion — and that by the end of the decade it'll come to between $3 trillion and $4 trillion.

All of that spending is helping prop up a whole host of companies — in construction, real estate, energy and more.

Data center construction started exploding hand in hand with artificial intelligence. Consulting firm McKinsey and Company estimates buildouts globally will total nearly $7 trillion. 

“It is really difficult to compare what is happening today to other types of investment,” said Eugenio Aleman with Raymond James. 

Still, Aleman took a shot. He said it’s analogous to the build-up of the internet itself. 

“We have to go back to the end of the 1990s where we saw this very, very large investment,” he said.

Back then we were building telecommunications networks. Now, it’s giant complexes to house servers.  

“Projects are popping up across the country, and it definitely has been an expansive market,” said Darryl Neapolitano at building materials supplier Amrize.

It just made a deal with Meta to provide cement with a lower carbon footprint — an important factor for doing business with tech firms. 

“We're focused very much on how we can decarbonize the supply chain itself and actually just meet the schedules for the projects, which are typically fairly aggressive,” said Neapolitano. “It’s having tremendous impact on the construction industry.”

Eric Gaus with market intelligence firm Dodge Construction Network said the amount of data center business for the sector has grown from the hundreds of millions in the mid-2000s to tens of billions a year.

“One of the things that we are forecasting is that the data center construction sector is going to be larger than traditional offices,” said Gaus.

Balancing out the contraction in that area of the economy.