I spend most of my working life around data centers, mostly on the energy side, and I’m still learning the water side. One thing that never gets old is finding out how much real engineering, and real environmental effort, sits behind every data center you read about in the headlines. Nobody claps for the mechanical room, or the sustainability report. So I wanted to.
Here are five firms building this infrastructure, and five companies running it, doing work worth knowing about right now.
The Builders
McKinstry
McKinstry has been in data center work for over 50 years, which is longer than most of the buildings they now cool have existed. What stands out to me is that they don’t just design MEP systems, they manufacture them off-site too. Their own line is that no other MEP firm offers off-site manufacturing for MEP systems the way they do, and that lets them stand behind bigger chunks of a project instead of handing off risk at every seam. They’ve logged over 500 MW of completed and commissioned data center work and another 400 MW in design, plus more than 300,000 square feet of manufacturing space to build it in. They’re also doing liquid cooling retrofits on live, high-density sites without taking them down, which is a genuinely hard problem to solve well.
DPR Construction
DPR is building four data hall buildings and a network building for Meta in Richland Parish, Louisiana, about 2 million square feet of a 4 million square foot campus that will be Meta’s largest data center project to date. What I like is the sustainability detail buried in the scope: direct-to-rack liquid cooling for lower energy use, embodied carbon reduction, water reduction measures, and a push for LEED certification. That’s not a press release checkbox, that’s a lot of coordinated engineering decisions made early enough to matter.
Black & Veatch
Black & Veatch brings something most pure AEC firms can’t, over a century of utility relationships in power and water. That matters more than people realize when a hyperscale campus is waiting on grid interconnection or a water permit. Their data center work spans owner-operated substations and microgrids on the power side, and industrial water reuse and treatment on the water side, including systems built specifically to conserve fresh water while a facility runs nonstop. Treating water as infrastructure instead of an afterthought is exactly the mindset this industry needs more of.
TLC Engineering Solutions
TLC’s mission critical group, led by Mark Gelfo and Jay Martin, both with 25-plus years in high-performance and mission critical design, focuses on the unglamorous but essential stuff: infrastructure assessments, UPS upgrades and commissioning on live sites, and high-density conversions where the facility can’t go dark while the work happens. Their project list includes UPS upgrade commissioning on live data centers in Texas and Ohio, which tells you they’re comfortable doing precise work under real operational risk, not just on a clean sheet of paper.
kW Mission Critical Engineering, a member of WSP
Before WSP acquired them in 2021, kW MCE was a 175-person firm that had built a real reputation in mission critical MEP design. One project that stuck with me: a 98,000 square foot DataBank data center in Atlanta that combined colocation space with waste heat recovery, smart grid integration, and Tesla battery storage. That’s the kind of project that makes you rethink what a data center’s energy profile can look like. Now under WSP’s global footprint, that same team is still doing the work, just with a bigger platform behind it.
The Operators
That’s the build side. Here are five companies running data centers who back up the sustainability talk with real, documented numbers.
AWS
AWS reported a global data center Water Usage Effectiveness of 0.12 liters withdrawn per kilowatt-hour in 2025, a 52 percent improvement since 2021, and says it’s 75 percent of the way to being water positive by 2030, up from 53 percent the year before. Their fleet-wide Power Usage Effectiveness sits at 1.14, and their carbon-free energy portfolio includes more than 700 projects worldwide with the capacity to generate over 40 gigawatts. Numbers like that don’t happen by accident. Someone is tracking every liter and every watt across hundreds of facilities.
Meta
Meta’s newest data centers run on a closed-loop liquid cooling system, the same water-glycol mixture cycling through the hardware for up to a decade without needing to be replaced. The company says a typical AI-optimized facility using this approach uses less water annually than a couple of full-service restaurants, which runs against the assumption that AI infrastructure is automatically a water hog. They also ran a machine learning pilot that cut cooling fan energy use by 20 percent and water use by 4 percent, and they open-sourced their liquid-cooled rack design, IcePack, through the Open Compute Project so other companies can use it too.
DataBank
DataBank’s ATL5 development in Atlanta included identifying and relocating a population of Georgia asters, a protected native plant, before construction, working with an environmental consultant to do it right instead of just clearing the site. They also built water-efficient landscaping and a native wildflower garden to support local pollinators. It’s a smaller-scale story than gigawatts and cooling loops, but it’s the kind of on-the-ground environmental care that’s easy to skip and easy to notice when it’s missing.
CyrusOne
CyrusOne cut its carbon emissions 29 percent since 2021 while growing its business 70 percent in the same period, which is the actual hard part of sustainability, growing without your footprint growing with you. Their San Antonio facility became the first data center in Texas to earn Gold certification under the TRUE zero-waste system. They’ve also lined up more than 22 billion dollars in green and sustainability-linked financing since 2024 to back a 2030 climate-neutral goal verified by the Science Based Targets initiative.
Applied Digital
Applied Digital just signed a 210 megawatt, 15-year deal for its fifth AI data center campus, worth roughly 5.2 billion dollars in the base term and up to 12.7 billion if every renewal option gets used. That brings their contracted portfolio to five campuses, 1.4 gigawatts of critical IT load, and about 2.15 gigawatts of grid-connected power capacity. That’s the kind of growth curve that explains why so much MEP and construction work is happening in places that weren’t on anyone’s data center map five years ago.
That’s ten companies, five building this infrastructure and five running it, all doing real, documented work. None of them asked me to write this either. If you’re one of the people behind these numbers, or you know them, I’d love to hear the parts that don’t make it into the press releases. And if you’re building something in this space that deserves a mention next time, tell me about it.
