Nonresidential construction spending grew in July. Exactly one category is responsible for all of it: data centers. That's the finding first reported by Construction Dive, working off the U.S. Census Bureau's monthly construction spending report — and if your business doesn't touch a server room, the number that should worry you isn't the growth. It's the zero everywhere else.

Here's what that report actually tracks: every dollar of nonresidential building put in place nationwide — offices, warehouses, hospitals, schools, hotels, retail, all of it. In July, the only line that moved was data centers. Everything else sat flat or slipped. That's not a one-month blip; it's the same pattern this desk has been tracking for months in New Jersey, where towns keep throwing up moratoriums against exactly the projects propping up the national number.

We've covered that fight from both sides this year — New Jersey's data-center pushback widening even as financing deals keep closing anyway, town halls in Lysander and Naugatuck drawing the same battle lines. Every one of those local fights is, by the Census Bureau's own math, a fight over where the only real growth in American nonresidential construction actually lands.

So if your book is office fit-out or ground-up retail, this report is telling you the market isn't coming back this year — it's just not growing anywhere outside hyperscale campuses with their own trade mix: switchgear, chillers, backup generation, fiber runs. That's a different set of subs than a typical commercial job, and it's concentrated in a handful of towns fighting to keep it out.

So watch the moratorium fights, not the bid boards. A data center that clears a zoning board in our region is a real scope of work months before it ever hits a Total Bid Data download — and right now, that fight is basically the whole nonresidential market.