News Breakbulk & Project Cargo
Centers of gravity
Datacenter growth poses manufacturing hurdle, project carrier opportunity
By Laura Robb
The already rapid construction of datacenters in the US is struggling to keep up with the growing needs of artificial intelligence and cloud storage, and uncertainty around tariffs is amplifying those hurdles.
Capital expenditures by the five largest cloud infrastructure providers increased by almost 60 % year over year to $ 55 billion in the second quarter of 2024, according to data from S & P Global Market Intelligence, and most of that spending is directed to the building of datacenters that host AI capabilities.
Market Intelligence data also shows the datacenter footprint is projected to grow more than 58 %— to more than 480 million square feet— between 2024 and 2029.
“ The datacenter industry has been growing dramatically in the past several years, even before the AI explosion two years ago,” said Liu Perkins, senior research analyst on datacenter infrastructure at S & P Global Market Intelligence.“ The cloud datacenters have already been in strong growth. But on top of that, this AI growth has triggered a big change, [ positioning ] the North American market in the leading position, and now the rest of the world is trying to catch up as well.” S & P Global is the parent company of the Journal of Commerce.
“ The datacenter industry has been growing dramatically in the past several years, even before the AI explosion.”
Speaking at the Journal of Commerce’ s Breakbulk and Project Cargo Conference in New Orleans, Beth Branch, president and CEO of the Port of New Orleans and CEO of the New Orleans Public Belt Railroad, said that datacenters offer a“ really massive” opportunity for breakbulk and project cargo over the coming years. She referenced Meta’ s construction of a $ 10 billion artificial intelligence datacenter in northeast Louisiana— which will be Meta’ s largest site globally— as an example of the scale of data projects in the pipeline.
Growth has been driven further by government investments and incentivization.
“ The speed that datacenters are being built has become condensed,” a project cargo shipper told the Journal of Commerce.“ The velocity that projects like this can be done in is amazing when there is government money available that can be thrown at them.”
Dan Thompson, an S & P Global research analyst with a focus on datacenters, said that the industry is“ operating behind the curve” in terms of fulfilling demand, and while companies are aggressively building datacenters, questions remain whether they can truly meet the infrastructure needs for emerging technologies like artificial intelligence.
Sourcing snags
The demand for datacenters has led to a significant manufacturing backlog, which some analysts say could be impacted by tariffs on Chinese products, thus affecting project timelines and import costs.
Artificial intelligence and cloud storage is forcing exponential growth in the datacenter industry, and in an industry where manufacturing is already a significant pain point, tariffs on Chinese-sourced infrastructure components is a taboo topic for many datacenter engineering, procurement, and construction companies( EPCs). According to S & P Global Market Intelligence, artificial intelligence’ s growing use of graphic processing units( GPUs) consumes as much as 10 times more energy per chip than traditional central processing units( CPUs).
16 Journal of Commerce | June 2025 www. joc. com