The biggest hurdles for data center contruction
Moving a data center from design to operation is a long and arduous process for operators
The road to hell is paved with good intentions and, it turns out, the road to getting approval for an AI data center can prove hellish. With an ever growing need for more compute, as well as growing grid constraints and distrust over their climate impact, in the name of generative AI, and a construction industry already under tremendous strain. Just how data centers get built is just as interesting as why they’re being built in the first place.
Rob Laudati is chief product and partnership officer at Render Networks, a critical infrastructure specialist. He tells ITPro that laying out the typical process for getting approval for a data center, from initial consultations, to permitting, to construction and delivery is like “painting a fairly ugly picture”. According to him, the bottleneck tends to be in the permitting approval process that must go on before the lion’s share of the work gets done.
"It's turned out to be the long pole in the tent in almost all of these projects, because those permits will go through various jurisdictions of local, county, state, [and] private landowners,” he explains. “Typically the land is never purchased, but there are easements created and permits approved, and that is an enormously difficult process, highly variable.”
That permitting isn’t just for land use. It can be for zoning, but it can also require approvals based on power, water, pollutants, and other environmental factors – like whether building the project will disrupt the patterns of migratory birds or local air pollution. Then there are logistical headaches: who is going to build it? When is it going to be built by? Will the public be happy? When it comes to permitting, sources who spoke to ITPro said that while there are exceptions, these processes tend to last months rather than days or weeks.
Data center emissions standards
Kaitlyn Bencosme is senior managing consultant in the air and climate group at the engineering and consultancy firm Ramboll. She’s one of the people who helps steward clients through the permitting process, which in her case means making sure the permits surrounding air and climate are squared away. For example, do the gas turbines you may be using meet the mandated emissions standards under local, state, and federal laws and does what you’re permitting match your use case?
“Step one is figuring out what air emissions are happening so your combustion equipment, any kind of diesel storage, that could have any off gassing, that sort of thing, and then you have to permit those activities with the local authority having jurisdiction (AHJ),” Bencosme explains.
Without air permits, construction can be severely limited, depending on where the data center is being built. In some areas of the US, you can still pour foundations or grade the area in this phase. However, Bencosme says there is one fairly clear rule:
“Every state kind of has their own variation on what they will allow you to construct. A pretty hard line is that you can't turn on any emissions equipment prior to having your permit in hand.”
Bencosme adds that when companies set out minimum uptime requirements, such as five nines, it can necessitate a large amount of emission generating equipment. However, often the permitting environment or other constraints won’t allow for it.
“They want to put in this pie in the sky image of a huge AI data center, and then I have to bring them back to reality where I'm like, ‘Well, in this specific part, because of the rules that you have to comply with, you'll only be able to do X.”
Another problem, what Bencosme calls a fatal flaw, is when a company is looking for a permit that requires the purchasing of emissions offsets but there aren’t any available in a given region.
“In the Dallas Fort Worth area, for example, it's nearly impossible to find any credits. So facilities in that area, even if they wanted to exceed the major source threshold which right now is 25 tons per year. They feasibly could not do it… Everything else is fluid just based on facility, goals, and timelines. And it's usually timelines.”
The right labor for building data centers
Emissions standards aren’t the only barrier. Finding the right labor for the job can also be a hurdle. Tony Qorri is vice president of construction at Data Bank. He says that while his focus is always on hiring talent in the local market, sometimes those people aren’t available.
“You might have a national general contractor that has a presence in multiple markets, but then when you get to the subcontractor perspective, you look at places like Texas, Georgia, Northern Virginia, the tradesmen are very hard to secure.”
Qorri says that these issues, whether they’re from a regulator or a workforce standpoint, can be complicated when it comes to projects in rural areas where regulatory meetings may happen less frequently and the labor force just isn’t available.
And then there’s the large elephant in the room: a growing discontent in the communities where data centers are being built with concerns over water consumption, power usage, and emissions all being front of mind. Laudati sees part of the issue as being rooted in a lack of coordination that leads to repeated disruptions to people’s everyday lives.
“I think it is a maturity issue. That people are running and trying to deliver these systems as soon as possible, and they're not taking a moment to really think…’How could I actually save time if I did these projects in concert with each other?”
Qorri points to the need for continued education and for more companies to see their primary role as being a good steward while completing their project:
“How do we continue to help educate the folks that really don't know what it is that we do or have this general idea of a data center?”
Changes are underway in the market. More advanced liquid-cooled infrastructure, such as closed-loop systems, direct-to-chip cooling, and immersion cooling. In August 2025, TechUK found the average data center in England uses less water than the "typical leisure center".
But data center operators will have to balance efforts to disrupt data center designs for sustainability with construction targets. The road ahead for all involved requires long-term planning, a per-region strategy, and flexibility in the face of a highly dynamic market.
