The cost structure of a data centre build has moved decisively away from the structure and into the systems. On artificial intelligence bids in 2026, MEP and controls represent about 75 percent of the guaranteed maximum price, with electrical distribution alone at 32 to 38 percent — a profile no other building type shares.
Data centres are being procured in Saudi Arabia at a pace that assumes the country's contractors already know how to build them. The cost structure suggests that assumption deserves scrutiny, because a data centre priced in 2026 barely resembles the commercial building it is nominally related to.
Global shell-and-core costs for data centres are running at roughly $11.3 million per megawatt in 2026, against about $7.7 million per megawatt in 2020. That inflation is not driven by concrete. It is driven by what has to be installed inside the shell and by the density the shell now has to accommodate. On artificial intelligence focused bids this year, mechanical, electrical and controls scope accounts for around three-quarters of the guaranteed maximum price, with electrical distribution alone taking 32 to 38 percent. A conventional office fit-out puts MEP at a fraction of that.
The consequence is a different kind of contractor. In markets where the sector has matured, the lead firms self-perform or tightly control concrete and MEP coordination rather than subcontracting them as separate packages, and the specialists who matter are the ones who can install raised floor, power distribution and cooling systems to commissioning standard rather than the ones who can put up a frame. Average hyperscale build time runs 18 to 24 months, and programme extensions come predominantly from electrical equipment lead times, not from civil or structural work. A data centre programme is therefore an equipment procurement exercise with a building attached, and the critical path sits in a switchgear factory.
Saudi Arabia is committing to this discipline at scale. DataVolt is developing a campus at Oxagon in NEOM planned at 1.5 GW, with a 360 MW first phase in which HUMAIN is jointly developing around 100 MW, targeted for availability in 2028. HUMAIN has broken ground on facilities in Riyadh and Dammam and is targeting around 1.9 GW of capacity by 2030 and more than 6 GW over the coming decade. Those are not a handful of one-off projects. They constitute a rolling programme of specialist mission-critical construction over at least a decade.
What that requires from the Saudi contracting market is a set of capabilities that are scarce everywhere and newly scarce here. Mission-critical work is graded on commissioning, not on completion: integrated systems testing, load bank testing, failover demonstrations and concurrent maintainability proofs. It requires electrical contractors comfortable with medium-voltage distribution, uninterruptible power systems and generator plant at campus scale, and mechanical contractors who can balance and commission chilled-water systems to a tolerance that a conventional building never demands. It also requires quality regimes on the civil side — pour temperatures, differential control, floor flatness — that suit heavy equipment loading.
None of those skills sit in the artificial intelligence sector. They sit in the contracting and MEP market that fills the halls at Big 5 Construct Saudi, where more than 1,000 exhibitors are showing across general construction, concrete, heavy equipment, HVACR and facilities management this week. The co-located HVACR Saudi Arabia and Totally Concrete Saudi Arabia events cover, between them, most of the technical content of a data centre build.
The competitive question for Saudi contractors is whether they treat data centres as another building type or as a separate business line. The global evidence points to the second. The firms that have taken meaningful share in this sector elsewhere did so by specialising — standardising designs across repeat campuses, building direct relationships with equipment manufacturers to secure factory slots, and retaining commissioning teams as permanent staff rather than hiring them per project. That is a structurally different company from a general contractor.
It also has consequences for the Saudi equipment supply chain. If electrical distribution is a third of the cost of every data centre the Kingdom builds for the next decade, then switchgear, transformers, busway, UPS systems and generator sets become a localisation target with a defined, bankable demand curve behind them — the kind of anchor demand that has justified domestic manufacturing investment in other Saudi industrial categories. The data centre programme is an information technology story at the point of announcement. Everywhere after that, it is an industrial one.