Data centre construction on takt: what the research says, and where takt helps

Data centre work has arrived in the Nordics at a scale few contractors have planned for. Microsoft is building data centres in Espoo, Kirkkonummi and Vihti, with construction of a second phase due to start in 2026,¹ and their waste heat will go into Fortum’s district heating network.² In September 2026 Google announced another €13 billion over two years for data centres in Kajaani, Muhos and Vaala, an expansion in Hamina and related AI infrastructure, and said construction would create more than 37,000 jobs.³ In August, the Finnish newspaper Kaleva reported that these sites need so many electricians that Finland does not have enough of them.⁴

If your company is moving into this market, what is different about these sites? This post first looks at what research and industry reports say. Then it turns those findings into steps for the site team, using takt production. A takt plan splits the building into areas and moves each trade through them one after another at a fixed rhythm, the takt. Where our platform helps, we show how. Where it does not, we say so.

What the research and industry reports say

Delays are common, and many causes start before work reaches the site

A Financial Times analysis reported by Network World found that nearly 40% of US data centre projects expected to open in 2026 would be delayed by at least three months.⁵ Executives blamed chronic shortages of labour and equipment, difficulty securing enough grid power, and slow permitting.⁵ In Turner & Townsend’s 2025 cost index survey, 48% of respondents named access to grid power as the biggest obstacle to delivering projects on schedule, and the firm points to long waits for grid connections as the main constraint. 83% believed local supply chains were not well prepared for the growing use of advanced cooling.⁶

Design does not stand still either. In December 2022 Meta stopped a planned two-building expansion in Odense after foundations, sewers and cables were already in.⁷ The contractor, Per Aarsleff, announced that its DKK 2.4 billion civil works contract had been terminated while work was in progress.⁸ The company said it was rethinking its plans so it could build a new kind of data centre for AI workloads.⁷ In Finland, Sami Vatilo of the engineering consultancy Ramboll points out that if the site has no suitable detailed local plan (asemakaava), drafting or changing one can take years.⁹

The site team cannot control any of this, but it can control how much of the resulting variation reaches the trades.

Building services are the largest scope and start last, so they absorb everyone’s delays

The construction law firm Fenwick Elliott, in a review of common problems on data centre projects, describes mechanical and electrical work (MEP, or building services) as the largest scope of work and often the last trade to start, followed by a long commissioning period. Delays to earlier trades have a big effect on it.¹⁰

Finnish research found the same pattern on other types of building. In an Aalto University study, building services experts said their work is concentrated at the end of the project, so delays elsewhere hit it hard. They said master schedules were too generic and should allow for commissioning and function testing. They also considered takt a good fit for building services, because it works in shorter periods and smaller packages.¹¹ On a data centre, where power and cooling are the product, all of this matters more.

Trade stacking is how a delay turns into disruption

Trade stacking means several trades crowding into the same areas at the same time. In a 2026 article on delay claims, Edward Foyle, a partner at Fenwick Elliott, explains how it happens on data centres. Delays to earlier works can release several areas at once, and subcontractors such as building automation specialists then have to put crews into all of them at once. Shared cable containment and busbars mean a delay in one area or phase can spill into others.¹²

This is the problem takt production was designed to solve. A takt plan releases one area per period, at a fixed rhythm, so trades follow each other instead of piling into whatever space opened up.

Commissioning needs its own detailed plan

One frequent and avoidable cause of delay, Foyle writes, is the lack of a detailed commissioning plan linked to the construction sequence. Commissioning involves many parties, so one party’s resource limit can hold up the whole testing sequence. Late permanent power, cooling water or network connectivity is a common bottleneck.¹² Fenwick Elliott’s 2025 review adds that commissioning stakeholders often don’t feed into the schedule at the start, so commissioning turns out larger and more involved than expected.¹⁰

Long-lead equipment and late design decisions drive the critical path

Foyle lists switchgear, UPS systems, chillers and CRAC (computer room air conditioning) units as long-lead items that often drive the critical path. Value engineering can delay the design freeze, causing rework and procurement delays.¹²

Iris Tommelein and Samir Emdanat look at the same problem from the takt side. In a 2025 paper for the International Group for Lean Construction (IGLC) conference, they argue for a strategic takt plan, set early, whose assumptions are written into the procurement schedule. That plan tells contractors what capacity to commit and tells suppliers when to deliver. Without it, bringing specialty contractors and suppliers on board later may require contract changes.¹³

Repetition makes takt work, and the evidence is coming in

Data halls are highly repetitive. Apgar, Smith and Copenhaver studied a private data centre campus where the team adopted takt time, pull planning and location-based scheduling. They compared roofing across five buildings built over three years. Roofing durations fell after the team moved to flow-based planning.¹⁴

Equipment installation can follow the same rhythm as the building. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology analysed 10 construction and 7 equipment installation cases. They showed both stages on one shared takt plan and argued that linking the two yields further time savings.¹⁵

Prefabrication and logistics help as well. The Global Switch data centre in Singapore installed about 350 prefabricated MEP modules, which Singapore’s Building and Construction Authority says cut the construction period by more than 10%.¹⁶ Aalto researchers found that takt production performs better when paired with matching logistics, such as just-in-time material kits.¹⁷

Labour is the binding constraint, in the Nordics too

Construction executives quoted in the Financial Times analysis said there were not enough electricians and pipe fitters.⁵ Kaleva’s reporting names large material quantities, tight schedules and a shortage of installers among the challenges in Finland. It also reports an urgent need to train electricians and building services specialists in the north.⁴

Knowing what is happening on site can matter more than the plan

Alhava, Rinne, Laine and Koskela analysed a takt project that delivered good results on cost, schedule and quality, even though the takt rhythm largely broke down near the end. They attributed the success mainly to real-time situation awareness from a digitalised site. Disciplined use of applications and pragmatic site leadership also played a part.¹⁸

Lawyers say much the same. Foyle’s second article describes hundreds of small obstacles arising every day on a data centre site, and says contractors must log them as they happen. He recommends a reliable, regular record of the issues causing delay in each working area, plus look-ahead schedules every week or every two weeks.¹⁹

What to do about it on site

Set the takt plan, commissioning included, before procurement locks in

Agree the takt areas, the order of trades and the takt length early, then write the plan’s delivery dates into the procurement schedule for switchgear, generators, chillers and UPS units. This is the strategic takt plan Tommelein and Emdanat argue for. Suppliers know when to deliver, specialty contractors know what crew size to commit, and when equipment does arrive late you can see straight away which areas and trades it hits.

This matters most for electricians and pipe fitters, the trades that are hardest to find. A fixed rhythm lets you tell each subcontractor how many people you need and in which weeks, early enough for them to find the crew.

Put commissioning into that plan from the start, as its own sequence of steps tied to the areas and systems it tests. The Fenwick Elliott reviews and the Aalto study above show what happens when it is left out. Bring the commissioning manager and the testing specialists in when the plan is set, because, as McHugh, Dave and Bolpagni found on an Irish data centre project, their people may need to be booked weeks in advance.²⁰

Create the works sequence and apply it across the repeated sections

Data halls, energy centres and often whole buildings repeat. Create the works sequence for one of them in detail and apply it to every repeated section. Keep one version of the process, so that when the team learns something in hall 2, the fix reaches hall 3 and every hall after it.

In our platform, the sequence of trades and tasks for one hall is saved as a template, called a takt train, and placed hall by hall on the schedule. Change the template and the change reaches every hall where it is placed.

Release one area at a time, and keep the areas small

Stacking starts when several areas open at once. Release areas at a steady rhythm instead, and make them small enough that the mechanical and electrical crews are not in each other’s way. A whole data hall is often too big to be one area. Abbasian-Hosseini and colleagues studied a $50 million data centre with 43 trades and found that in weeks when more trades shared the same areas, the plans were less reliable, and the finishing trades suffered most.²¹

A plan drawn by location and time shows the clash before it happens. On our schedule each block is one area in one takt, split by trade, so you can see two crews booked into the same area at the same time while there is still time to move one of them.

Check commissioning readiness before each step

With commissioning in the plan, give each pre-functional check and commissioning step a date and an owner. Before each one starts, check what it depends on: documentation, access, inspections and the work before it. McHugh, Tzortzopoulos and Manu studied the commissioning of the energy centres for a 110 MW microgrid supplying data centres on a Dublin campus. Only about a third of tasks were ready to start when commissioning began. After the team introduced readiness checks and a fixed weekly planning routine, the share of planned work completed rose from roughly one in eight tasks to nearly two in three.²²

Our platform does not manage test scripts or integrated systems testing (IST), so keep those in your commissioning tool. The takt plan makes sure the areas and trades are ready when testing starts.

Record every impediment where it happens

A data centre site produces many small obstacles every day. Log each one as it happens, against the area and the trade, with a reason. The record shows patterns while there is still time to act. It is also the kind of record, made at the time, that lawyers recommend keeping in case delays are disputed later.¹⁹ Make logging quick, or reasons get skipped. Apgar and Smith, who studied the same campus, found that about a third of roughly 2,400 takt failures (planned tasks that were not completed as planned) on one building had no reason recorded.²³

In our platform a crew lead marks a task as interrupted in the mobile app and picks a reason, such as missing materials, space not available or previous task not complete. The planner sees it on the live plan at once, so the daily crew lead huddle starts from what is actually happening on site.

What a takt plan cannot fix

Grid connections, permits, equipment procurement and integrated systems testing sit outside a takt plan. The plan limits how much of the variation they create reaches the trades, and shows you early where it gets through.

If you are pricing your first data hall, we can draft a takt schedule for your site free of charge. For the basics, see our introduction to takt time in construction and the research on takt production in Finland.

Sources

Footnotes

1. Microsoft (2026, 28 April). Microsoft käynnistää pääkaupunkiseudun datakeskusalueen toisen vaiheen rakentamisen. Microsoft News Centre. ↩

2. City of Espoo (2023, 13 December). Espoo sold land in Hepokorpi to Microsoft for data centre project. ↩

3. Yle News (2026, 9 September). Google announces €13bn additional investment in Finland. ↩

4. Klemettilä, P. (2026, 5 August). Datakeskusrakentamisessa uhkaa resurssipula – sähköasentajia tarvitaan isoille työmaille niin paljon, että Suomessa osaajat eivät riitä. Kaleva (paywalled). ↩ ↩²

5. Patrizio, A. (2026, 22 April). 40% of data center projects will be late this year, study finds. Network World, reporting a Financial Times analysis. ↩ ↩² ↩³

6. Turner & Townsend (2025, 5 November). AI data centre rush raises alarm over construction supply chain. Data Centre Construction Cost Index 2025–2026 press release. ↩

7. Bloomberg News (2022, 15 December). Meta Stops Planned $342 Million Data Center Expansion in Denmark. Bloomberg. ↩ ↩²

8. Per Aarsleff Holding (2022, 13 December). Termination of contract for data centre in Odense. Company announcement. ↩

9. Vatilo, S. (2024, 11 December). Datakeskushankkeen nopea toteutus vaatii rautaista osaamista. Ramboll. ↩

10. Hancock, P. (2025, 8 December). Common issues in data centre construction, and how to avoid them. Fenwick Elliott Annual Review 2025/2026. ↩ ↩²

11. Peltokorpi, A., Varteva, K., & Seppänen, O. (2021). Taloteknisten järjestelmien rooli rakennushankkeen prosessissa. Research project final report, Aalto University. ↩

12. Foyle, E. (2026, 23 April). Delay Claims in Data Centre Construction: Part 1. Fenwick Elliott. ↩ ↩² ↩³

13. Tommelein, I. D., & Emdanat, S. (2025). Strategic Takt Planning. Proceedings of IGLC33, Osaka and Kyoto, pp. 306–317. DOI 10.24928/2025/0116. ↩

14. Apgar, B., Smith, J. P., & Copenhaver, D. (2022). How Does Flow Impact Data Center Roofing Durations? A Case Study. Proceedings of IGLC30, Edmonton, pp. 681–692. DOI 10.24928/2022/0175. ↩

15. Dlouhy, J., Oprach, S., Binninger, M., Richter, T., & Haghsheno, S. (2018). Using Taktplanning and Taktcontrol in Production Projects: Comparison of Construction and Equipment Phases. Proceedings of IGLC26, Chennai, pp. 890–898. DOI 10.24928/2018/0477. ↩

16. Building and Construction Authority, Singapore. First in Singapore: Large-Scale Use of Prefabricated MEP (PMEP). Global Switch Singapore Woodlands Data Centre. Case study. ↩

17. Tetik, M., Peltokorpi, A., Seppänen, O., Viitanen, A., & Lehtovaara, J. (2019). Combining Takt Production With Industrialized Logistics in Construction. Proceedings of IGLC27, Dublin, pp. 299–310. DOI 10.24928/2019/0156. ↩

18. Alhava, O., Rinne, V., Laine, E., & Koskela, L. (2019). Can a Takt Plan Ever Survive Beyond the First Contact With the Trades On-Site? Proceedings of IGLC27, Dublin, pp. 453–464. DOI 10.24928/2019/0261. ↩

19. Foyle, E. (2026, 29 April). Delay Claims in Data Centre Construction: Part 2. Fenwick Elliott. ↩ ↩²

20. McHugh, K., Dave, B., & Bolpagni, M. (2023). The Role of Lean in Digital Project Delivery. Proceedings of IGLC31, Lille, pp. 140–151. DOI 10.24928/2023/0214. ↩

21. Abbasian-Hosseini, S. A., Liu, M., & Hsiang, S. M. (2015). Social Network Analysis for Construction Specialty Trade Interference and Work Plan Reliability. Proceedings of IGLC23, Perth, pp. 143–152. ↩

22. McHugh, K., Tzortzopoulos, P., & Manu, E. (2026). Enabling lean production through digital planning systems. Proceedings of IGLC34, Singapore, pp. 143–154. DOI 10.24928/2026/0215. ↩

23. Apgar, B., & Smith, J. P. (2023). Do Failures in a Takt Plan Fit the FMEA Framework?. Proceedings of IGLC31, Lille, pp. 1383–1394. DOI 10.24928/2023/0246. ↩