Our September in one read: Bedrock's empty cabs, Goldbeck and Mortenson's US venture, the fight over power, and three rate decisions that went against builders.

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Goldbeck's joint venture with Mortenson brings factory-built construction to US data centers from 2027. Bedrock Robotics has excavators working live Texas and Nevada sites with nobody in the cab, and customer Champion Site Prep has already run one unattended.

The ECB raised to 2.5%, the Fed hiked for the first time since 2023 to 3.75% to 4%, and the Bank of England held at 3.75% on a 6-3 vote. Any scheme priced on a cut needs rerunning.

CBRE found US data center construction up almost 25% in the first half, with power vacancy at a record low 1.4%. JE Dunn launched a power generation unit, and federal agents disrupted a China-backed network targeting power companies.

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We published five editions in September. Together they show an industry under pressure from three sides, with a handful of firms trying to build their way out of it.

Labor is still short, and the ECB and the Fed both raised rates within a week of each other. Data centers are the one market still growing, but they need more power than the grid can currently supply. The grid itself has been a target for a China-backed hacking network for years.

We spent time in Austin with the Bedrock Robotics team at the end of July, and August went into editing the film that came out of it, as we mentioned in our August 2026 recap. The film landed last week alongside a written edition on Bedrock's autonomous excavators, showing machines digging on live commercial sites in Texas and Nevada with no operator inside.

Kevin Peterson, Bedrock's co-founder and CTO, told us the team picked the excavator on purpose, since it takes four to five years to master and asks an operator to control roughly six degrees of freedom at once, which makes every other machine on site simpler by comparison.

The company grew out of Waymo, and it retrofits existing excavators with cameras, LiDAR, and compute, betting that the autonomy layer sitting on top is the part worth owning. Kevin's next goal is fleet coordination, where a foreman tells several machines to move a stockpile and leaves them to carry out the task.

Trey Taparauskas, President and CEO of Champion Site Prep, gave us the most useful customer view. His Central Texas earthworks firm employs 300 people across around 100 projects a year; his own crew pushed back hard at the first meeting with a team from Silicon Valley, and he still told them Champion would go autonomous in 2026.

Supervised runs came first, with a Bedrock employee riding in the cab, and the week before we filmed, one of Champion's excavators worked a live job for several hours with the seat empty. Trey argues his best operators move up into foreman roles running groups of machines, and Steven Stapleton, who has run excavators by hand for 30 years, told us the labor pipeline behind him is already depleted.

The Goldbeck and Mortenson joint venture, signed on August 26, takes a different route to the same labor gap. Goldbeck's European factories produce columns, walls, slabs, and facade panels, and three-person crews bolt them into 1,000 square meters of weatherproof shell a week across roughly 500 buildings a year, on fixed-price and fixed-date contracts. Mortenson builds data centers for Meta, including a $10 billion, one-gigawatt campus in Lebanon, Indiana, and the venture brings Goldbeck's model into that market starting in 2027.

Klas Berghede, VP of production and innovation at Boldt, explained why the timing matters. On complex projects, 40 to 50% of what the client pays now goes toward managing the work, and on two Boldt programs running 15 years, the staff passing information around has nearly doubled. His answer is to standardize 80% of a job well enough that the business can afford for the remaining 20% to stay difficult and to use AI to carry lessons from one project into the next so that no team starts from scratch.

Our Friday roundup on the grid put three stories side by side. CBRE found US data center construction rose almost 25% in the first half of 2026, while power vacancy fell to a record low of 1.4%, with Atlanta overtaking Northern Virginia as the top market for new construction. JE Dunn set up a dedicated power generation unit inside its advanced technology group, pointing to AI infrastructure, manufacturing onshoring, and an aging generation fleet as the forces driving demand.

In the third, the FBI and DOJ seized domains tied to QTFY, a China-backed operation that spent years targeting power companies, telecom firms, hospitals, and federal agencies, including the Department of Energy. Investigators say the group exploited software vulnerabilities to steal credentials and keep long-term network access.

In our central banks edition we laid out three rate decisions landing within eight days, with only the Fed genuinely undecided, and all three have since landed. The ECB raised its deposit rate to 2.5% on September 10, the Fed followed on September 16 with a unanimous quarter-point hike to a range of 3.75% to 4%, and the Bank of England held at 3.75% the next day on a 6-3 vote, with three members backing a rise to 4% and UK CPI at 3.1% in August. The Bank of England's next decision is on 5 November.

The construction data we covered alongside those decisions leaves little room for comfort. UK construction PMI fell to 44.3 in August, its twentieth straight month below 50, with housing down at 37.6, and eurozone construction has now contracted for 52 straight months.

In the US, total spending ran at a $2.16 trillion annual pace in July, and Anirban Basu, chief economist at Associated Builders and Contractors, said nonresidential spending outside data centers had dropped to its lowest level since September 2023. As we noted in that edition, a scheme that pencils at 3% can stop working at 4%, and stripping out the one category holding each of these markets up leaves a weaker picture than the headline numbers suggest.

On labor: Bedrock Robotics has excavators running with nobody in the cab on live commercial sites in Texas and Nevada, and one of Champion Site Prep's machines worked a live job for several hours without an operator the week before we filmed. Goldbeck and Mortenson signed their joint venture on August 26, with US work starting in 2027.

On money: The ECB raised its deposit rate to 2.5%, and the Fed raised its range to 3.75% to 4% in September, while the Bank of England held at 3.75% ahead of its next decision on 5 November.

On power: US data center construction rose almost 25% in the first half of 2026 as power vacancy fell to a record low of 1.4%, JE Dunn launched a dedicated power generation unit, and federal authorities disrupted a China-backed hacking network that had targeted power companies and the Department of Energy.