O'Leary's 9 GW Utah Data Center Approved, Valero Posts $1.3B Q1 Profit, and Megaprojects Surge 500% Year to Date

This week's intelligence covers Kevin O'Leary's freshly approved 9 gigawatt Stratos data center campus in Utah, Valero's blowout $1.3 billion Q1 profit, Cheniere's Corpus Christi Stage 3 Train 3 reaching substantial completion, Commonwealth LNG launching its financing process at 63 percent contracted, a Sightline Climate report revealing only 5 of the 16 gigawatts of 2026 data centers are actually under construction, and ConstructConnect data showing megaprojects up more than 500 percent year to date.

Utah Approves a 9 Gigawatt Data Center Campus

On April 27, Utah's Military Installation Development Authority approved a development agreement for a hyperscale data center campus in Box Elder County that could eventually consume 9 gigawatts of power, more than double the entire state's current average electricity use of roughly 4 gigawatts. The project, dubbed Stratos, is being developed by O'Leary Digital, the infrastructure arm of Shark Tank investor Kevin O'Leary, and would span 40,000 acres of private land plus 1,200 acres of military and state owned property.

For context: a single 9 gigawatt campus is larger than the average power demand of more than three million U.S. homes. It is more than double the size of Microsoft's Fairwater campus that just opened in Wisconsin, and it is in the same league as the entire xAI Colossus expansion in Memphis. The Stratos site is being marketed as an integrated build to suit campus, with on site power generation and the ability to support multiple hyperscaler tenants.

The announcement is the latest signal that the data center buildout has decisively moved out of traditional hubs like Northern Virginia and into power rich, land rich, business friendly states. Texas, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Indiana, Tennessee, and now Utah are absorbing the overflow that Loudoun County and Phoenix can no longer accommodate at this scale.

What this means for fabrication and construction: A 9 gigawatt campus is not a single data center, it is a five to ten year capital program. The fabrication scope alone, structural steel, electrical skids, mechanical modules, switchgear lineups, and chiller plant packages, will rival the largest petrochemical complexes in the country. Projects like Stratos validate the trend: the data center industry is now a heavy industrial customer, and the contractors winning this work are the ones with shop capacity, modular delivery experience, and the workforce to deliver across multiple phases simultaneously.

Valero Reports a $1.3 Billion Q1 Profit on Surging Refining Margins

Valero Energy reported first quarter 2026 results on April 29, swinging to a net income of $1.3 billion, or $4.22 per diluted share, compared to a $595 million loss in the same period last year. Revenue rose to $32.4 billion, and the Refining segment alone delivered $1.8 billion of operating income, reversing a $530 million operating loss from Q1 2025. Refining margin per barrel rose 56 percent to $3.91 billion total.

The story is the same one Gulf Coast refiners have been living all spring: tight global product markets, the ongoing Middle East supply disruption, and a feedstock cost advantage on Permian sourced WTI that does not transit the Strait of Hormuz. Valero ran 2.9 million barrels per day of throughput in the quarter and returned $932 million to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases. The company also issued $850 million of 5.150 percent senior notes due 2036, locking in long term capital while balance sheets are flush.

The earnings release was not entirely clean. A March fire at the Port Arthur refinery forced a temporary shutdown, and the facility is now running at reduced capacity while repairs and insurance recoveries proceed. Valero is also continuing to wind down its Benicia, California refinery, with $337 million in asset retirement obligations recorded and a prior $1.1 billion impairment now flowing through the books. Both events are reminders that the U.S. refining footprint is consolidating around the Gulf Coast, not expanding outside of it.

What this means for fabrication and construction: Q1 refining earnings of this scale are exactly the conditions that pull capital projects forward. When refiners are printing margin and sitting on $5.9 billion in cash, the conversations turn to debottlenecking, reliability upgrades, and turnaround scope expansion. The Port Arthur fire also creates an immediate need for repair, replacement, and field execution capacity, which historically goes to the contractors with crews already in the region. For fabrication shops with refinery experience, the next twelve months should be the strongest backlog environment since 2014.

Cheniere Brings Corpus Christi Stage 3 Train 3 to Substantial Completion

Cheniere Energy confirmed that Train 3 at its Corpus Christi Stage 3 expansion has reached substantial completion, marking the third of seven midscale trains in the 10.5 million ton per annum project to begin commercial operation. With Trains 1, 2, and 3 now online, Cheniere has Trains 4 through 7 in various stages of construction and commissioning, with full project completion targeted for 2026.

Beyond Stage 3, Cheniere also has Trains 8 and 9 under construction, both of which received FID in June 2025 and are now reported at 21 percent complete. The company has been the most disciplined builder in the U.S. LNG space, executing back to back midscale train fleets without the cost overruns and schedule slippages that have plagued some of its competitors. The midscale train design, originally engineered with Bechtel, has become the de facto template for fast cycle U.S. LNG capacity additions.

Looking at the broader picture, U.S. LNG export terminals are expected to run at higher utilization rates in 2026 than in 2025, despite already running near peak. Corpus Christi Stage 3 will start up Trains 5 through 7 this year, adding 0.6 billion cubic feet per day of capacity. Golden Pass will continue ramping its first two trains, adding another 1.4 billion cubic feet per day. Plaquemines and Elba Island both received DOE approvals in March and April to increase their permitted exports.

What this means for fabrication and construction: Cheniere's midscale train approach has created the most predictable, repeatable LNG construction work in the U.S. market. Each train is roughly 1.5 million ton per annum, with consistent module sizing, standardized skid packages, and a known fabrication ecosystem along the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts. For fabricators, this is the platform play of the LNG industry. The contractors with shop space inside the Cheniere supply chain are looking at multi year visibility on backlog, with predictable cadence and standardized deliverables that reward efficiency and execution discipline.

Commonwealth LNG: 63% Contracted, Financing Launched, FID in the Coming Weeks

Commonwealth LNG continues to advance toward final investment decision. On April 8, project sponsors Kimmeridge and Mubadala, operating through the Caturus joint venture, announced the finalization of long term offtake agreements with buyers and the launch of the project financing process with lenders. Management has publicly stated that FID is expected in the coming weeks. Last week's Technip Energies substantial authorization, worth between 500 million and 1 billion euros, kept engineering and procurement moving in parallel.

One detail worth flagging: Commonwealth is now reported at approximately 63 percent contracted, after a previously announced 1 million ton per annum offtake with Japan's JERA fell through. Historically, U.S. LNG developers have taken FID at around 80 percent contracted volumes. East Daley Analytics noted this in an April 22 brief, calling the gap a header scratcher and raising the question of whether Commonwealth will close the contracting gap before FID, or whether sponsors will move ahead at the lower contracting level on the strength of merchant exposure to a tight global LNG market.

The Caturus team plans to invest $12.5 billion in the first phase, which is expected to generate around $3.5 billion in annual export revenue and ship up to 9.5 million tons per annum, equivalent to approximately 1.21 billion cubic feet per day of gas. Operations are targeted to begin in 2030.

What this means for fabrication and construction: Commonwealth's modular liquefaction design is one of the most fabrication intensive LNG approaches in the market. The project depends on shop built modules transported to site, which means peak labor and capacity demand lives in the fabrication ecosystem, not the field. For shops with the capability to deliver large process modules on rail or barge, an FID announcement would unlock multi year backlog. Even a delayed FID still keeps engineering, procurement, and pre fabrication scope live under the Technip Energies authorization, so the work is moving regardless.

Sightline Climate: Only 5 GW of 16 GW 2026 Data Center Pipeline Actually Under Construction

A new tracker from Sightline Climate, published April 28, cuts through the hyperscaler announcement headlines. Of the 16 gigawatts of data center capacity that big tech has publicly committed to bringing online globally in 2026 across roughly 140 projects, only about 5 gigawatts is actually under construction. For 2027, the gap is similar: 6.3 gigawatts under construction against 21.5 gigawatts announced. Sightline expects 30 to 50 percent of the 2026 pipeline to be delayed or cancelled.

The reasons are familiar: power transmission constraints, equipment lead times measured in years, financing complexity, permit timelines, and labor capacity. Oracle and OpenAI dropped a planned expansion from 1.2 gigawatts to 2 gigawatts in March 2026 after financing talks collapsed. Meta is reportedly in discussions with Crusoe to absorb the unused capacity, with Nvidia having put down a $150 million deposit to lock in chip supply.

Big tech committed roughly $400 billion to AI infrastructure in 2025, with another $650 billion lined up for 2026. The capital is real. The question is whether the construction supply chain, the power grid, and the workforce can catch up to the announcement velocity.

What this means for fabrication and construction: The 16 gigawatt versus 5 gigawatt gap is the most important number in industrial construction right now. It tells you that announcements do not equal execution, and that the bottleneck on AI infrastructure is no longer capital, it is execution capacity. Fabricators and construction firms with the proven ability to deliver, not just promise, are about to see a massive sorting event. Hyperscalers cannot afford to give scope to firms that miss schedules, and they are increasingly willing to pay a premium for execution certainty. The market is rewarding vertically integrated operators with their own shops, their own crews, and their own management bench. That is exactly the model PSV Industries is built on.

Megaprojects Up Over 500% Year to Date

ConstructConnect's April Construction Economy Brief, summarized in early month industry coverage, reports that nonresidential megaprojects, those exceeding $1 billion, are up more than 500 percent year to date in 2026. Office construction, which now includes data centers in standard industry classifications, alone accounts for approximately $35.6 billion in construction activity. ConstructConnect Chief Economist Michael Guckes called it the strongest start to a year in recent memory.

The composition of the surge tells the real story. It is not a generalized recovery in commercial construction. It is a concentrated wave of data centers, semiconductor fabs, LNG terminals, refining and petrochemical revamps, and large industrial campuses. The $1 billion plus segment is doing nearly all the heavy lifting, and the geography is heavily skewed toward the Gulf Coast, Texas, the Mountain West, and the Upper Midwest.

This concentration matters for workforce and fabrication planning. A 500 percent year over year increase in megaproject starts is an entirely different planning problem than 5 percent overall sector growth. It means peak labor demand will hit specific markets harder than headline numbers suggest, and contractors who can move 150+ skilled workers per project to the right zone at the right time will command pricing power that the industry has not seen in a decade.

What this means for fabrication and construction: A 500 percent megaproject surge concentrated in a handful of markets is not a national construction story, it is a regional execution crisis waiting to happen. Owners and EPCs are already discovering that local workforce pools cannot absorb the demand. The answer is not another labor broker. The answer is a vertically integrated execution partner that owns its workforce, its shop capacity, and its management infrastructure end to end, and can deploy 150+ skilled workers per project to the right job at the right time. PSV Industries is built for exactly this environment.

Construction Workforce: Hiring Rate Hits Lowest on Record

The latest workforce data tells a sobering story underneath the megaproject headlines. U.S. construction employment averaged 19,300 net new jobs per month in Q1 2026 and reached 8.33 million in March. The headline numbers look healthy, but the underlying market dynamics are the most constrained on record.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the construction hiring rate fell to 3.3 percent in February 2026, the lowest level since BLS began tracking the measure in December 2000. Quits fell 29.5 percent year over year, suggesting workers are no longer confident enough to switch employers. Job openings declined from 292,000 in November to 202,000 in February, even as the industry added jobs. The picture is a labor market that is locked in place: workers are not moving, employers cannot hire, and the system is short of replacement capacity.

The Associated Builders and Contractors estimates the industry needs 349,000 net new workers in 2026, rising to 456,000 in 2027. Every additional $1 billion in construction spending creates demand for approximately 3,450 jobs. Multiply that against a 500 percent megaproject surge, and the math does not close.

What this means for fabrication and construction: The lowest hiring rate on record, paired with a 500 percent megaproject surge, defines the next 24 months. Owners are going to discover, project by project, that their EPCs and contractors cannot hire fast enough to staff what they have committed to build. The companies that win in this environment are the ones that already control their workforce, develop their own talent pipeline, and execute scope of work with their own people. That is the PSV Industries operating model: a vertically integrated workforce delivering 150+ skilled workers per project under a single integrated management structure.

The Bottom Line

A 9 gigawatt data center campus newly approved in Utah. Valero printing $1.3 billion in a single quarter. Cheniere methodically commissioning train after train at Corpus Christi. Commonwealth LNG closing in on FID with financing in motion. Sightline Climate exposing the 11 gigawatt gap between data center promises and actual construction. Megaprojects up 500 percent. And a workforce that is hiring at the slowest rate on record.

The pattern is unmistakable. Capital is abundant. Project announcements are at all time highs. The constraint is execution. The fabricators, EPCs, and construction firms that can actually deliver, on schedule, with their own people, are about to be the most valuable players in U.S. industrial construction. PSV Industries is built for this environment, and we are positioned to execute the work the rest of the market is going to struggle to staff.