Skanska has signed a contract with an existing client to build four new data centers in the southeast region of the USA, a deal worth USD 1.2 billion (about SEK 11.2 billion), the Swedish construction group announced on August 20, 2026, in a company release. The full value will be booked into Skanska’s US order bookings for the third quarter of 2026.
The project covers four buildings totaling approximately 75,000 square meters (808,000 square feet). Skanska’s scope is the shell construction plus interior fit-out of technical spaces, support areas, and office functions (the civil and building work that surrounds the racks, not the IT gear inside them). Construction begins in the third quarter of 2026 and is expected to complete in the third quarter of 2028, a two-year build window.
The client is unnamed, identified only as an existing client, the same formulation Skanska used in its recent Virginia and Georgia data-center releases.
A $1.2B Shell-And-Fit-Out Award, Not a Powered-Shell Bet
The contract’s shape is as informative as its size. At roughly $16,000 per square meter across 75,000 square meters of technical and support space, this is building work — concrete, steel, envelope, and the finished interior of the data halls and office areas. The servers, networking, and the power train that energizes them sit outside Skanska’s line.
Construction begins in the third quarter of 2026 and is expected to complete in the third quarter of 2028.
By the Numbers
- USD 1.2 billion (about SEK 11.2 billion): total contract value
- 4: new data centers under the contract
- ~75,000 square meters (808,000 sq ft): combined building footprint
- Q3 2026 → Q3 2028: construction start to expected completion
- SEK 179 billion: Skanska Group 2025 revenue, per the company
- ~25,900: Skanska Group employees
Skanska’s Running Data-Center Book in the US Southeast
The $1.2 billion award is the largest single data-center contract Skanska has announced, and it lands on top of a steady cadence of repeat work in the same region and for the same class of unnamed clients. On August 13, 2026, the company signed a USD 238M contract for a 22,000-square-meter, five-data-hall building in Virginia, the second building on that campus, with construction running from August 2026 to May 2028. A month earlier, on July 3, 2026, it booked a USD 94M initial contract for a 19,500-square-meter, four-data-hall building, also the second structure on an existing Virginia campus.
Georgia has been the other anchor. On April 9, 2026, Skanska signed a USD 75M contract for a data center there, followed on June 23, 2026, by a USD 255M supplemental award for a 22,700-square-meter building with five data halls and an administration fit-out, on a schedule that began in March 2026 and runs to the first quarter of 2028.
Read together, the pattern is a contractor that has become a repeat builder on multi-building campuses for a small set of large buyers, with each campus expanded building-by-building as the client’s capacity plan firms up. The economics Skanska is capturing are the civil-works share of the AI buildout — the segment of capex that flows regardless of which accelerator vendor wins the cluster, and one that books into the balance sheet as signed order backlog rather than a forecast. That same build-vs-equip split has been the running theme in Unite.AI’s infrastructure coverage, from NVIDIA’s case for AI factories as an investable asset class to the capital structures behind campus-scale projects in pieces like Global AI’s senior secured credit facility for sovereign AI data centers and Cisco’s $4B quarter of AI networking orders, which sits on the equipment side of the same campuses.
What Happens Next
Construction on all four buildings begins in the third quarter of 2026. The contract value flows into Skanska’s US order bookings for that quarter, which the company reports with its Q3 2026 interim results. Expected completion is the third quarter of 2028.
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