Skanska has signed a $1.2bn contract to build four data centres in the southeastern United States, the largest single data centre order the Swedish construction group has announced. The client is an existing customer, and Skanska is not saying who it is.

The four buildings will total around 75,000 square metres, or roughly 808,000 square feet, and Skanska’s scope covers the shell and the interior fit-out for technical spaces, support areas, and office functions. Construction starts in the third quarter of this year and is expected to finish in the third quarter of 2028.

The contract, worth about SEK 11.2bn, will be booked in Skanska USA’s order intake for the third quarter. In a sector where announcements often outrun contracts, that detail is the one that matters, because order bookings are audited and press releases are not.

It is also the kind of order that has been reshaping the industrial supply chain around it, from cable and conduit makers to switchgear suppliers, and it is why Prysmian paid $3.8bn for Atkore earlier this year.

Skanska has not named the state, the campus, or the tenant. It has also not said whether the four buildings sit on one site or several, which for a project of this size is a meaningful omission rather than a formality.

What is visible is the pace of the pipeline behind it. Skanska has announced a run of American data centre contracts this year, including $255m in Georgia for a 22,700 square metre building with five data halls, a $238m follow-on contract in Virginia, and a $94m second building on another Virginia campus.

Several of those were additional contracts on projects already under way, which is how the sector tends to grow: a client commissions one building, then commissions the next two while the first is still going up. The southeastern order breaks that pattern by committing to four at once.

The scale of it lands against a company that has just had its best quarter on record. Skanska took SEK 68bn in order bookings in the second quarter, up 20% year on year, of which SEK 39.5bn came from the United States, and its backlog reached SEK 297.5bn, or about 21 months of work.

Data centres now account for roughly a tenth of that backlog. Chief executive Anders Danielsson called the 21-month figure “unusually high”, while chief financial officer Pontus Winqvist offered the more cautious reading that “you can’t build a trend on one quarter”.

A $1.2bn order does not settle Winqvist’s point, but it does carry the run into a third quarter. Building four data centres to a 2028 completion is a two-year commitment from a client who is willing to say, in effect, that they expect demand to be there when the buildings open.

Geography is part of the calculation. American secondary markets are absorbing capacity for much the same reasons European operators have been leaving the big five hubs, namely land, power queues, and the cost of both.

Skanska’s American construction business has spent the past two years reorienting towards this work, and the projects share a family resemblance: a shell contract, a fit-out for technical and support space, a start date within a quarter of signing, and no named tenant.

Confidentiality is standard in the sector. Hyperscale operators generally require it, which is why a construction company can announce a billion-dollar order without being able to say anything about who will occupy the buildings or what will run inside them.

Nothing in the announcement addresses power, water, or grid connection, the three constraints that have stalled finished buildings elsewhere. Skanska is the builder rather than the operator, and those obligations typically sit with the client.

The company gave no further financial detail, no margin guidance on the contract, and no indication of whether more buildings on the same campus are under discussion. Its third quarter closes at the end of September, which is when the order will appear in the accounts.

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