Where the Daylighting Work Is: North America's 2026 Megaprojects

Picture a greenfield site outside Abilene, Texas. Months before the first server rack lands, the ground has to be opened: new electric feeders, water and cooling lines, fiber conduit, and fuel-gas pipe, all of it tied into corridors that were never built to carry this much load. Before a single trench is cut or a single bore is launched, someone has to find out what is already down there. That work, exposing buried utilities with pressurized water and a vacuum tank, is daylighting. And it is where the hydrovac industry meets one of the largest construction waves in decades.

This is not a forecast. It is a register. Below are real, named North American projects announced or under construction between 2024 and 2026, grouped by sector, each with the sponsor, the location, the timeline, and the dollar figure where disclosed. After each group we connect the build to the hydrovac angle: why these specific sites generate potholing, utility-locating, and slot-trench work for vacuum-excavation crews.

This piece stays off the macro forecast. The power-demand curve, the market sizing, and the why-now argument belong to a separate discussion. What follows is the project list a contractor can scan to know where the iron is going in the ground.

Why these builds need a vacuum truck

The economic case for daylighting is a damage statistic. The Common Ground Alliance, the trade body behind the 811 call-before-you-dig system, publishes an annual DIRT Report on damage to buried utilities. Its DIRT analysis logged roughly 197,000 unique damage reports to buried utilities, and the CGA has warned that damages remain at concerning levels and point to the need for industry-wide change as construction activity climbs. More digging, more strikes.

The cost is large and well documented. The CGA has estimated that excavation-related damage to buried utilities costs the U.S. economy roughly 30 billion dollars a year, a figure from its 2019 DIRT analysis of direct and indirect societal costs. That number is the reason owners, utilities, and general contractors increasingly write potholing into the spec rather than treating it as optional. Hitting a live gas lateral or a fiber trunk on a flagship project is not a line-item risk. It is a schedule-killer and a headline.

Megaprojects concentrate the risk. The builds below share a profile: enormous new loads landing on congested or poorly mapped existing corridors, tight timelines, and high-consequence utilities running close together. That is the exact condition where vacuum excavation earns its keep, exposing unmapped lines before a trencher or a horizontal directional drill goes in blind. The sectors generating the most of this work right now are AI data centers, LNG export terminals, long-haul gas pipelines, high-voltage transmission, and semiconductor fabs.

AI and hyperscale data centers: the biggest dollars on the board

Stargate is the headline number. The Stargate program, a partnership of OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank, and MGX, is targeting up to 500 billion dollars of investment. On September 23, 2025, the partners announced five new U.S. data-center sites, bringing the program to nearly 7 gigawatts of planned capacity and more than 400 billion dollars committed, with the flagship campus in Abilene, Texas. A campus measured in gigawatts is not a building. It is an industrial district with its own substations, water infrastructure, and gas service.

Meta's Hyperion campus is a Louisiana greenfield. Meta's Hyperion AI data-center project in Richland Parish, Louisiana was first announced in December 2024 at more than 10 billion dollars. It spans nearly 4,000 acres, is designed to deliver about 5 gigawatts of compute, and was granted roughly 3.3 billion dollars in tax breaks, structured as a 20-year sales and use tax exemption on equipment. A 4,000-acre rural build means almost everything underground is new and has to be tied into systems that were sized for farmland, not for one of the largest computing sites in the country.

xAI's Colossus is scaling fast in Memphis. Elon Musk's xAI is expanding its Memphis Colossus supercomputer toward roughly 2 gigawatts of capacity by adding a third building. Speed is the defining feature of these AI sites, and speed is precisely what makes pre-excavation valuable: when a crew is boring power and cooling into a live campus on a compressed schedule, exposing the conflict first is cheaper than repairing the strike later.

The hydrovac angle. Hyperscale campuses pull power measured in gigawatts, which means new transmission taps, on-site substations, and dense feeder runs. They consume large volumes of water for cooling, which means new water and reclaim lines. They are wired with fiber and, increasingly, backed by on-site gas generation, which means fuel-gas pipe. Those systems cross one another, and on a fast-track build the as-builts lag the field. Daylighting at each crossing is how crews keep a 5-gigawatt site from adding to the CGA damage count.

LNG export terminals: heavy industrial sites on the Gulf

Plaquemines LNG started exporting in late 2024. Venture Global's Plaquemines LNG in Louisiana shipped its first cargo on December 26, 2024, becoming the eighth U.S. LNG export terminal. Phase 1 carries roughly 1.3 Bcf/d of nominal liquefaction capacity, about 1.6 Bcf/d at peak, and the terminal reached first cargo roughly 30 months after its May 2022 final investment decision. A site that compresses that much gas runs a dense web of cryogenic and utility piping that has to be located precisely whenever new tie-ins or expansions are cut.

Golden Pass crossed the line in early 2026. Golden Pass LNG at Sabine Pass, Texas, a roughly 10 billion dollar joint venture owned 70 percent by QatarEnergy and 30 percent by ExxonMobil, achieved first LNG production from Train 1 on March 30, 2026. Total terminal capacity is about 18.1 million tonnes per annum across three trains, so commissioning one train still leaves substantial construction and interconnection work in motion.

Port Arthur is building in phases through the decade. Sempra Infrastructure's Port Arthur LNG in Jefferson County, Texas, a joint venture with ConocoPhillips, is building toward roughly 26 mtpa across Phases 1 and 2. Phase 1 Trains 1 and 2 are expected to begin commercial operation in 2027 and 2028, and Sempra advanced Phase 2, Trains 3 and 4, in 2025, targeting 2030 and 2031. A phased terminal means years of overlapping civil work, not a single dig-and-done window.

The hydrovac angle. LNG terminals are among the most utility-dense industrial sites in North America: cryogenic transfer lines, fire-water mains, instrument and electrical duct banks, and the feed-gas headers that connect the plant to interstate pipelines. Much of that runs in classified, high-consequence areas where a blind strike is unacceptable. Vacuum excavation is the standard tool for exposing those lines for tie-ins, for inspection digs, and for the laydown and foundation work that accompanies each new train.

Natural-gas pipelines: feeding the terminals and the turbines

Matterhorn Express moves Permian gas to the Gulf Coast. The Matterhorn Express Pipeline is an approximately 490-mile line moving up to 2.5 Bcf/d of natural gas from the Permian Basin to the Katy area near Houston. It entered service in late 2024, with initial flows beginning in fall 2024 and ramping to full capacity in early 2025. It is a joint venture of WhiteWater, EnLink Midstream, Devon Energy, and MPLX. A line of that length is a moving construction front, and the work does not stop at commissioning.

The hydrovac angle. Long-haul pipelines generate daylighting at foreign-utility crossings, road and rail bores, and existing-line tie-ins along the route. Before a horizontal directional drill is launched under a highway or a river, crews pothole to confirm the depth and position of what the bore will pass near. As gas demand from LNG terminals and gas-fired data-center power keeps rising, the laterals and gathering lines that feed these corridors keep the potholing crews booked well after the mainline is in service.

High-voltage transmission: the lines that carry the new load

SunZia is one of the largest transmission builds in the country. Pattern Energy's SunZia carries a price tag of roughly 11 billion dollars for the combined SunZia Wind and Transmission program, not for the line alone. The transmission element is a 550-mile, 525-kV HVDC line rated at 3,000 MW, running from central New Mexico to south-central Arizona, paired with a 3,500-MW wind project. It broke ground in September 2023 and reached commercial operation in 2026. A line of that scale crosses hundreds of miles of existing infrastructure, with conflicts possible along its length.

Greenlink Nevada is rebuilding the state's backbone. NV Energy's Greenlink Nevada is an approximately 4.2 billion dollar, 525-kV transmission program totaling about 585 miles. It splits into Greenlink West, about 350 miles from Las Vegas to Yerington, and Greenlink North, about 235 miles. Greenlink West has received federal BLM approval, with in-service dates in the 2027 to 2028 window. Transmission programs like this run for years and touch the utility corridors they cross.

The hydrovac angle. Transmission towers and converter stations require deep, precise foundations, and the access roads, substations, and underground get-out cables all have to thread past existing lines. At substations and urban interconnections in particular, where electric, gas, water, and communications all converge underground, potholing is the safe way to set foundations and route duct banks. The grid expansion needed to serve data centers and electrified industry is, on the ground, a multi-year stream of daylighting work.

Semiconductor fabs: campuses that build their own infrastructure

TSMC raised its U.S. commitment to 165 billion dollars. TSMC has lifted its total planned U.S. investment to 165 billion dollars in Phoenix, Arizona; its March 2025 expansion added three new fabrication plants, two advanced packaging facilities, and an R&D center. It broke ground on its third Arizona fab in April 2025, and the buildout is expected to support roughly 40,000 construction jobs over four years. A fab complex is effectively a small city of process utilities, almost all of it underground.

Micron's New York megafab is a 20-year program. Micron's memory megafab campus in the Town of Clay, Onondaga County, New York is a planned investment of up to 100 billion dollars over roughly 20 years on an approximately 1,377-acre site, with up to four fabs. Site and construction work is ramping, with first-fab construction starting around the second quarter of 2026. It is the largest semiconductor investment in New York State history.

Samsung is building 2nm logic in Texas. Samsung is investing more than 37 billion dollars in Taylor, Texas to build two leading-edge 2nm logic foundry fabs plus an R&D fab, supported by up to 4.745 billion dollars in direct CHIPS and Science Act funding from the U.S. Department of Commerce. Like the others, it is a greenfield campus that has to bring in power, water, and gas at industrial scale.

The honest counterweight: Intel Ohio

Not every megaproject runs on schedule. Intel's chip-fab project in New Albany, Licking County, Ohio, known as Ohio One, has been repeatedly delayed and slowed, with completion now pushed to roughly 2030 to 2031. Intel had spent about 3.7 billion dollars on the site as of 2025. The lesson for contractors is straightforward: megaproject timelines, and the daylighting work they generate, can slip. A pipeline of announced work is not a calendar of guaranteed work, and crews should plan capacity against committed, funded, and breaking-ground projects rather than press releases.

The hydrovac angle for fabs. Semiconductor plants are utility monsters: ultrapure water lines, process chemical and gas distribution, enormous electrical service, and wastewater systems, layered densely across a large campus. Tie-ins to municipal water and power, and the constant reconfiguration during a multi-fab buildout, mean vacuum excavation is in demand from site prep through years of expansion. Where the schedule holds, the work is steady and high-spec.

What operators should do now

1. Map your radius to the funded sites, not the rumors. Take the projects above that sit within a practical drive of your yard and rank them by status: shipping or producing, under construction, and approved but not started. Plaquemines, Golden Pass, Matterhorn Express, and SunZia are already operational or commissioning, which means active tie-in and maintenance digging now, not someday.

2. Position for the trades that hire daylighting crews. On these builds the buyer is usually the electrical contractor, the pipeline spread, the HDD subcontractor, or the site civil general contractor, not the project owner directly. Build relationships with the boring and utility-installation firms that will be mobilizing, because they are the ones who sub out potholing.

3. Spec your fleet to high-consequence work. Terminals, fabs, and substations demand documented, careful exposure of live high-pressure and high-voltage utilities. Make sure your trucks, water systems, and operator certifications match the safety and quality expectations of an LNG or fab site, where a single strike ends a contractor relationship.

4. Plan disposal before you mobilize. Sustained daylighting at scale produces a steady volume of slurry, and disposal access can constrain how much work you can take. Line up compliant dump sites and dewatering capacity near these project clusters in advance. See our coverage of disposal capacity and the GFL-Secure deal for how consolidation is reshaping dump-site access.

5. Underwrite for slippage. Treat Intel Ohio as the base case for risk: do not over-invest fleet against a single announced megaproject. Diversify across sectors and project stages so a delay on one campus does not strand your trucks.

The macro read

The throughline across data centers, LNG, pipelines, transmission, and fabs is the same: hundreds of billions of dollars of new industrial capacity is landing on the ground at once, and most of it depends on putting fresh utilities into corridors that are already crowded and imperfectly mapped. That is structurally good for vacuum excavation, because daylighting is the cheapest insurance against the damage problem the CGA has quantified at roughly 30 billion dollars a year.

For hydrovac operators, the opportunity is real but it is not evenly distributed. It clusters around specific places, the Gulf Coast LNG corridor, the Texas and Arizona fab and data-center belt, the Permian-to-Houston gas routes, and the Southwest transmission build, and it favors firms that can meet the safety and documentation bar these owners require. The work is there. The discipline is in chasing the funded, breaking-ground projects, staffing and equipping for high-consequence digs, and keeping a disposal plan that scales with the dirt. The companies that do that will be the ones with trucks on these sites for years, not just at the ribbon-cutting.

Hydrovac News covers the regulatory, disposal, and operational developments shaping the hydro-excavation industry across North America. For ongoing coverage, subscribe to our weekly newsletter.