ABC reports extremely slow hiring numbers for March, AECOM Hunt and Turner break ground on The Cleveland Browns new stadium, a $1B hospital is announced in Kansas City and U.S. Steel commits $1.9B to a new plant in Arkansas. Meanwhile, a $3B data center breaks ground in De Soto Kansas, Microsoft announces another Georgia campus and Turner releases their AI safety tool to the public. Let’s dive in!

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The construction industry posted 224,000 job openings on the final day of March, according to an Associated Builders and Contractors analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics JOLTS data. That figure climbed 23,000 from February but sits 54,000 below the same point last year.

Both sides of the labor market have gone quiet. Contractors are holding their crews, with the layoff and discharge rate falling to its lowest level since early 2024 and below any figure recorded prior to 2022.

Workers are equally reluctant to move, with quit rates running below the pace typical of the late 2010s and early 2020s.

ABC Chief Economist Anirban Basu described the dynamic plainly: the industry is defined by an utter lack of churn.

Hiring rebounded from February's historically low mark but remains extremely subdued, and the industry is in a holding pattern until economic uncertainty eases.


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The Cleveland Browns officially broke ground on the new Huntington Bank Field on April 30 in Brook Park, Ohio, marking the start of what is being called Northeast Ohio's largest economic development project to date.

AECOM Hunt and Turner Construction Company are serving as joint construction managers, with HKS as the designing architect. Haslam Sports Group owns the project.

The new stadium will be Ohio's first enclosed venue, built with a flexible capacity of up to 75,000. Its roof is a first-of-its-kind long span system designed without a truss, shaping both sightlines and overall design. The seating bowl is engineered to bring fans closer to the field than any other NFL stadium.

The venue is scoped well beyond game days, with plans for NCAA Final Fours, international soccer, and large scale concerts. Local partners DiGeronimo Companies, Independence Excavating, and Independence Construction are on the build alongside the joint venture.

The stadium is expected to generate more than 6,000 construction jobs, with a projected opening in 2029.

Children's Mercy Hospital announced plans April 29 for a new $1 billion plus acute care tower on its Adele Hall Campus in Kansas City, Missouri. The project will expand overall hospital capacity by 25% to 30% and include new PICU and NICU space, an ED expansion, a robotic surgical center, and research and translational medicine space. Enabling work starts this fall with a target completion of 2031.

U.S. Steel is committing $1.9 billion to build a new direct reduced iron facility at Big River Steel Works in Osceola, Arkansas, the first DRI facility of its kind in the United States. The investment connects the company's Keetac plant in Minnesota, which produces direct reduced-grade pellets, directly into the four electric arc furnaces operating at Big River. Construction is expected to support around 2,000 jobs at peak.

Beale Infrastructure is moving forward with a $3 billion hyperscale data center campus in De Soto, Kansas, with site preparation kicking off in May. At full buildout, the campus will span four buildings and more than one million square feet, with Evergy providing power and Beale privately funding all major infrastructure. Phase 1 is expected to bring hundreds of construction jobs and 50 operational roles.

Microsoft confirmed it is developing a data center campus in Tyrone, Georgia, a town of roughly 8,000 people in Fayette County, publishing the update through its Microsoft Local community blog on May 1. The project covers approximately 147 acres along North Highway 74, with two data center buildings totaling 500,000 square feet and a dedicated on-site electrical substation. Zoning was approved before the project became public, with development underway since November 2023.

Billions committed. Shovels in the ground. Contracts signed.

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Leeza SOHO is a 207-meter, 46-story commercial skyscraper in Beijing's Lize Financial Business District, designed by Zaha Hadid Architects for developer SOHO China.

Construction began in 2015 and the tower opened in November 2019. China State Construction Engineering Corporation served as general contractor, with Lingyun and Yuanda handling the facade.

The site presented an immediate structural challenge: a subway tunnel diagonally bisects the plot, forcing the design to split the tower into two halves within a single facade shell.

Each half is serviced by its own core, with the two sides belted together by steel trusses at structural rings, functioning as two towers unified into one. Four sky bridges and a double-insulated glass facade tie the halves together.

The central atrium runs 194 meters tall, the tallest in the world, twisting 45 degrees over the height of the building to draw natural light to all floors. The tower was designed to achieve LEED Gold certification, with advanced 3D BIM technology deployed across design, construction management, and building operations.

Turner Construction has made its AI-powered safety tool, SafeT Coach, available to the broader construction industry at no cost.

Developed internally and piloted extensively across Turner job sites, the tool runs inside OpenAI's ChatGPT environment and works as a virtual safety consultant. Workers can take a photo, ask a plain language question, and receive guidance grounded in Turner's EHS framework and OSHA standards.

SafeT Coach came out of Turner's AI Innovation Challenge, a company wide initiative to help employees build and prototype their own AI solutions.

Before going public, it was validated through field pilots and an independent external review by a risk partner. The tool has since logged more than 25,000 interactions with Turner staff, trade partners, and field teams.

Turner announced the public release during Construction Safety Week, which runs May 4 through 8. A version built on Google's Gemini platform is also in development, and external users' data remains separate from Turner's internal environment.