By Bob Heiderscheidt, President and CEO, MDI Access
The delivery date on a data center project has become the least certain number on the schedule. In April, Bloomberg reported that a third to half of the US data centers planned for 2026 were likely to be delayed or canceled, with roughly 5 GW under construction against 12 to 16 GW planned. In September, Bloomberg reported that people involved in Google and Blackstone's new AI cloud venture had accepted that data center projects now have about a 50% chance of meeting delivery dates, down from 90% three years ago. The causes are familiar: long equipment waits, power that arrives later than planned, scarce trades and organized local opposition. Most of those risks land on the owner, and most of them are decided long before anyone pours concrete.
That is the job of an owner's representative: one accountable party on the owner's side of the table, every day, from concept through commissioning. Here are the seven calls that matter most right now.
1. Lock the long-lead list before design is finished
Equipment is now the pacing item on many projects. Reuters reported in July that some high-voltage transformers now take multiple years to deliver, up from about a year in 2020 and 2021, and that high-voltage breaker lead times reached 125 weeks in the second half of 2025, up from 77 weeks in 2023. One California utility moved from buying about a year ahead to buying for projects roughly five years out.
The owner's rep should identify every long-lead item as soon as the design concept is stable, decide which ones to reserve or prepay, and make sure the purchase decisions are made by the owner, on the owner's timeline.
2. Get the power date in writing and treat it as the critical path
A site's power is only as good as the date it can be energized. Ask the utility for a written capacity and timeline statement, map every piece of upstream work your load depends on, and build the schedule backward from that date. If the date moves, the rep should be the first to know and the first to re-sequence the work around it.
3. Confirm the site matches the equipment plan
One of the sites in the Google and Blackstone venture was reportedly unsuitable because it did not have the right transformers. Mismatches like that surface late when the real estate decision and the equipment plan are owned by different people. A rep who holds both can catch the gap while it is still cheap to fix.
4. Price community and permitting risk early
The same report described organized local opposition pushing policymakers to look harder at projects, and data centers becoming a campaign issue ahead of the midterm elections. Treat entitlement as a schedule risk with its own owner: know the approval path, the hearings, and the issues likely to come up (noise, water, power costs) before the land is committed, and keep commitments made to the community tracked through construction.
5. Protect commissioning time when the schedule gets squeezed
When construction slips, commissioning is usually what gets compressed. Uptime Institute's 2026 outage analysis found that power remains the leading cause of impactful outages, with failures involving UPS systems, transfer switches and generators dominating. Those are the systems integrated testing exists to prove. The rep's job is to hold the line on testing time and to have the standing to say no when it is traded away for a date.
6. Make procedures part of the handover
The same Uptime analysis found that failing to follow established procedures is the leading driver of human-error outages, and it reported that one in five survey respondents put the cost of their most recent major outage above $1 million. A building is not ready when it passes its tests. It is ready when the operations team has the procedures, training and as-built documentation to run it, and the rep should make that a condition of turnover.
7. Check every bid, change and invoice against the budget
Scarce trades and scarce equipment create pricing pressure, and Bloomberg also cited shortages of switchgear and skilled labor as bottlenecks. In that market, change orders and invoices deserve more scrutiny, not less. A rep who checks bids and invoices against the budget, rather than taking them at face value, keeps cost growth visible while there is still time to act on it.
A recent example of the stakes
Project Braid, the Alphabet and Blackstone venture that plans to rent Google AI processors starting in 2027, launched with $5 billion from Blackstone. By September, Bloomberg reported delays at major sites: a scrapped plan with a developer in Cheyenne, Wyoming, a site without the right transformers, and executives working to a much lower confidence in delivery dates. The company said it remains on track for 500 megawatts next year. Well-capitalized programs face these risks too, which is why the decisions above need a dedicated owner on the owner's side.
When an owner's rep earns the fee, and the trade-offs
The role adds a fee layer, and it pays off when it protects or saves more than it costs. It tends to earn its place for first-time builders, complex or phased programs, compressed schedules, and owners without in-house capital project staff. A repeat builder with a mature delivery team and a standard design may need less.
The arrangement works best with clear terms. Define in the contract what the rep can approve and what returns to the owner, so decisions move faster rather than slower. Draw the lines between the rep, the contractor's project manager, the design team's construction administration and the commissioning agent. And confirm the rep's independence: ask in writing about any other contracts on the project and how the fee is structured.
What doing it right makes possible
A project with one accountable party on the owner's side gets its hard decisions made early, while they are still cheap. Equipment slots are reserved before they disappear, the power date drives the schedule instead of surprising it, commissioning keeps its time, and operations inherits a facility it can run. In a market where the delivery date is the scarcest commodity, that is the advantage.
MDI can help with Owner's Representative Services, serving as the owner's single point of contact for architects, engineers and contractors from early concept through commissioning, with daily schedule tracking and budget checks against competitive bids. Equipment Procurement provides vendor-neutral specification and sourcing for UPS systems, generators, switchgear and other mission-critical equipment, and Commissioning Services test power, cooling, fire protection and controls individually and as an integrated system before the facility goes live.
Talk to one of our advisors about keeping your project on schedule
Sources
- TechRadar (citing Bloomberg), "Nearly half of US data centers planned for 2026 canceled or delayed," April 2026: https://www.techradar.com/pro/if-one-piece-of-your-supply-chain-is-delayed-then-your-whole-project-cant-deliver-nearly-half-of-us-data-centers-planned-for-2026-canceled-or-delayed-and-things-could-soon-get-much-worse
- Bloomberg, via The Star, "Data centre backlash slows new cloud venture," September 2026: https://www.thestar.com.my/business/business-news/2026/09/10/data-centre-backlash-slows-new-cloud-venture
- Reuters, via Kitco, "US power companies scramble to secure equipment as surging data center demand strains supplies," July 2026: https://www.kitco.com/news/off-the-wire/2026-07-09/us-power-companies-scramble-secure-equipment-surging-data-center
- Uptime Institute, "Uptime Announces Annual Outage Analysis Report 2026," via ITWeb, May 2026: https://www.itweb.co.za/article/uptime-announces-annual-outage-analysis-report-2026/o1Jr5MxPNOwMKdWL