After some government shutdown-related delays, data on construction spending for the entirety of last year is finally out.Friday’s U.S. Census Bureau report shows total construction spending in 2025 declined 1.4% from the previous year. But there was a bright spot — data centers. Big Tech has been spending hundreds of billions of dollars to build out the infrastructure of AI, and that’s evident in the construction data. But whether it’s carrying the industry, or economic growth more broadly, is a bit hazier.Spending on data center construction grew by almost 30% year over year in December. That’s a lot of growth for an industry that only recently became notable, said economic analyst Joseph Politano with Apricitas Economics.“The Census Bureau did not break out data centers as their own category because it was presumed that they were just a part of office buildings,” Politano said.Now, he said, spending on data center construction is starting to eclipse spending on all other office buildings. It’s growing despite some pretty large headwinds in the industry, said Macrina Wilkins, director of market insights at the Associated General Contractors of America.“We're seeing a lot of slowdowns because… you don't have enough workers, material prices are too expensive,” she said.Tariffs have raised costs for steel, aluminum, and copper, while the immigration crackdown has shrunk an already inadequate labor pool, she said.But for deep-pocketed Big Tech, these are small problems.“Because there's a lot of incentive and a lot of motivation and momentum that I think is helping the industry, instead of in any way taking away from it,” Wilkins said.Still, the data center boom hasn’t been enough to offset the broader slowdown in the construction industry, said Zack Fritz, an economist at Associated Builders and Contractors.“Overall, it's not that large of a category,” Fritz said. “For context, it's a little bit smaller than the warehouse segment right now.”Data center construction spending hit an annual rate of $45 billion in December, which is a pretty small share of those hundreds of billions of dollars in AI capital expenditures.Joseph Briggs, who leads the global economics research team at Goldman Sachs, said most of the spending has gone to electronic components. He estimated about two thirds of all spending on data centers goes into imported semiconductors and other computer parts.That spending gets subtracted from the gross domestic product, he said.“As a result, the boost of growth is small,” Briggs said.Goldman Sachs estimated the data center boom contributed about 0.2% to GDP growth in 2025. That isn’t nothing in a $30 trillion economy, but it’s certainly not everything.