By KERRY SMITH BUCK

RICHLAND PARISH, La. – A platform that features 360 construction imaging in real time is guiding a complex data center build toward completion in northeast Louisiana.

As a featured break-out session at AECTechCon™ in St. Louis last week, Brett Kostial –  Turner’s virtual design and construction campus manager, and Lauren Horne, enterprise account executive for Buildots – walked the audience through the crazy-complex logistics involved in delivering the $10 billion, 2-gigawatt data center campus project.

It’s a joint venture of Turner Construction Co., DPR Construction and Mortenson. The client is Meta. Buildots is a 360 construction visibility platform that launched in 2018.

AECTechCon 2026, a premier two-day conference hosted by the AGC of Missouri, took place May 6–7 at the St. Charles Convention Center in St. Charles, Mo. The conference brought together more than 400 architecture-engineering-construction professionals to focus on digital transformation, technology integration, BIM/VDC and industry innovation.

Real-time, 360-degree views are proving essential to deliver the mega-project, according to Kostial and Horne.

Sitework on the more than 4 million-square-foot project began in 2024, with project completion anticipated in 2030. The site spans more than 2,200 acres.

“This was, at one time, the largest data center project in the Western Hemisphere,” said Kostial. “Choosing an automated progress-tracking tool was essential for this project, which measures five miles long by one mile wide. In the past year, there’s not an inch of dirt we haven’t turned over.”

Four data centers – each totaling 465,000 square feet – are part of the project scope. Kostial said the site’s footprint fits over the island of Manhattan, giving AECTechCon attendees an idea of its enormity. “Each data center requires 1 million square feet of mechanical and electrical capacity,” he added.

The schedule for delivering square footage to megawatts is the fastest of any project in Turner’s history, Kostial noted. “The project owner (Meta) dubbed it ‘the ludicrous schedule,’ he said. “We had to change the nickname so that subcontractors would want to bid on it.”

Project teams use Buildots to track progress with precision, down to the individual trade, floor, area and element, Horne said. “Our platform enables contractors and subs to build at the speed of technology. It delivers intelligence and predictive analytics that enable construction leaders to hit aggressive milestones while maintaining the precision that mission-critical data centers demand.”

Together with Buildots, joint venture team members are utilizing AI-powered overlays of the data center build to constantly gauge the actual percentage of completion. Horne says the overlays facilitate reality capture from the field with the actual plan from the 3D model and schedule.

“Buildots is helping augment what is already being done in the field by capturing 80 percent to 90 percent of whatever a camera can see, tracking it and comparing field notes at the end of the day with what the 360 camera captures,” Kostial said. “This is a new approach, to be sure…it’s setting up tools with the end in mind.”