Nearly 40% of US data-centre projects scheduled to complete in 2026 are at risk of running more than three months late, according to satellite-analytics firm SynMax. The delays threaten the infrastructure behind AI rollouts by Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle and others, raising concerns that the returns on hundreds of billions of dollars in announced capex (capital expenditure) will arrive later than expected.

Hyperscalers (the largest cloud operators running mega data centres) are racing to build sites drawing 1 gigawatt or more — roughly a nuclear reactor's output. Only a handful will complete this year, including campuses by Amazon Web Services, Meta and Elon Musk's xAI. A flagship 1.4GW, 1,200-acre Oracle campus in Shackelford County, Texas (which will equip OpenAI with chips and compute) has cleared land for six of 10 planned buildings but shows visible construction on only one. SynMax now sees the first building ready in December at the earliest, while comparable-project benchmarks point to late 2027. A 1.2GW OpenAI-linked site in Milam County, Texas has one building under construction. Only a project in Abilene is on track.

Bottlenecks: shortages of specialist workers (electricians, pipefitters), strained grid capacity, missing gas turbines and transformers, slow permits and rising local opposition. Remote sites are pushing labour costs up as much as 30%. SynMax estimates more than 60% of 2027 projects have not yet begun construction. Capstone's Josh Price describes a "regulatory lag" against the pace of developers. Source: Financial Times, 17 April 2026, Rafe Rosner-Uddin, Martha Muir, Nassos Stylianou and Aditi Bhandari.