A 2025 report from McKinsey projects that the data center market will require $6.7 trillion to keep up with computing demand. This meteoric growth means data center developers need teams who can jump right in to get these projects online with speed and with skill. That’s where the STO Building Group’s family of builders comes in.
Our mission critical experts have been building data centers for 40 years,” SAYS TERENCE DENENY, SVP OF STO MISSION CRITICAL. “That expertise evolved into our STO Mission Critical centers of excellence, which draw from our teams in Texas, Dublin, and everywhere in between to support the entire family of builders.”
It’s true, the Structure Tone and Structure Tone Southwest mission critical teams have been serving data center clients in the US, Ireland, and the UK for years. They have continued to follow clients wherever they need them—from enterprise hubs in the New York City metro area to large multi-megawatt campuses in Virginia, Texas, and beyond. When one such client approached the Dublin team with a 4.5MW project opportunity in the Netherlands, they jumped right in. Two years later, with an office in Amsterdam, a growing portfolio, and a team built to scale, STO Mission Critical’s European journey has taken off. “Our approach is to follow the client, control the risk, and do what we do best,” says Jason Monks, Structure Tone Dublin’s mission critical director. “We went from running a project to running a business in the Netherlands. And we’re just getting started.”
Layton Construction had done some data center work for select clients over the years, but what really made the difference was their existing comfort with traveling teams. “We were serving healthcare and industrial clients all over the country,” says Layton EVP Cris Bryant. “For us, it was a perfect marriage of expertise in similar sectors and traveling teams with clients who already trusted us.”
While the Layton team was growing in the data center market on their own, joining STO Building Group took it to a new level. “With the rate this market is growing, we would have capped out on what we could do,” says Bryant. “As part of STOBG, we can pull in resources from across the company to get these jobs done and help our clients continue to expand.”
LF Driscoll is especially known as a healthcare construction leader—but they’ve actually been working on mission critical projects for decades. “We’ve been supporting data center projects across the company for years thanks to our understanding and expertise in large-scale MEP infrastructure, commissioning, and controls,” says LF Driscoll EVP Michael Delaney. “So as the market ramped up, we were poised and ready to take on even more. ”The LFD team now leads the preconstruction efforts for STOBG’s data center projects in the eastern half of the US and is partnering with Layton on several more.
RC Andersen has been guiding industrial clients on siting and building their projects for decades. “The building shells and the site development are similar,” says Neil Ascione, president of RC Andersen. “So with the added fit-out, systems, and commissioning expertise of STOBG, we were in a great position to help.”
Chris Carey, RC Andersen’s director of mission critical agrees. “Many of our industrial development clients own properties that may be able to serve the data center sector,” he says. “We can leverage the expertise we have across the organization to help them do that and avoid any pitfalls.”
As data center clients continue to expand south—in fact, Ajax Building Company has several projects in the works across Georgia and the Carolinas—the team has been tapping into its STOBG resources as well as lending its traveling teams to data center projects in other regions, learning the intricacies that make data center construction unique. The team’s long-time experience in building for resilience also comes into play, says William Byrne, Ajax north regional director. “We build a lot of emergency operations centers that have mini data centers and require a high emphasis of reliability and continuity,” he says. “Both facilities operate as essential hubs that must function without interruption. With STOBG backing us, we have the expertise and confidence to advise our clients from both perspectives.”