Chicago Construction Billionaire Deepens Bet on Data CentersChicago Construction Billionaire Deepens Bet on Data Centers

(Bloomberg) -- Clayco, a Chicago-based builder led by billionaire Bob Clark, is positioning itself to grab for more of the boom in data centers. 

The company is starting a new unit called Clayco Compute to sharpen the focus on data centers and quantum computing projects. Clayco, a top five builder of data centers in the US, already has 57 active such projects across the country, and it says its clients are pressing for more as they rush to meet a surge in demand. 

“These are customer growth rates that we’ve never seen before, certainly in my lifetime,” said Ryan McGuire, who will lead the new division. “We’ve got some customers telling us that, as an example, they’re going to double their revenue every year for the next 10 years.”

The new org chart underscores how Clayco, which Clark founded 40 years ago, is deepening its bet on the enormous data needs of artificial intelligence and quantum computing. Data centers accounted for about half of Clayco’s sales in 2024 when the business generated $3.6 billion in revenue – approximately doubling the previous year’s tally. Clayco Compute is expected to reach over $4.5 billion in revenue by 2026.

Spurred also by social media, cloud computing, and streaming as well as AI, data usage has increased 100 times over the past 15 years, Blackstone has estimated. But data centers’ huge electricity and water needs limit where they can be built, posing an increasing challenge for tech companies.  

Related:Data Center Construction Boom: 10 GW of New Capacity Set for 2025

“If you can’t get the power to the site, you can’t build and turn on and activate your data centers, and the infrastructure in the US just isn’t in a place right now where it can, today, meet all the demand,” McGuire said. 

Those pressures are also intense for quantum computers, which rely on “qubits” and can store data in multiple forms: ones, zeros, both, or something in between. 

Clayco was tapped by Related Midwest as the general contractor for the Illinois Quantum and Microelectronics Park, the state-backed development that will bring an investment of at least $1 billion from PsiQuantum Corp. as well as commitments from International Business Machines Corp. and local universities. 

The quantum park’s campus along Lake Michigan will include the first utility-scale quantum computer built in the US.