On 10 August, AECOM — an infrastructure consultancy that plans and designs highways, water systems, defense facilities and, increasingly, data-center campuses — published a record order book and a quarterly loss in the same release. A construction-management job awarded in 2019 took a $337m pre-tax charge for higher projected cost to complete, on terms the company now says it would not accept. The shares fell 19% over two sessions.

The charge is the noise. The signal is what the quarter, and those of its peers, reveal about where money from the artificial-intelligence build-out is actually landing — and it is not landing first on the drawing board, as the standard theory holds.

The theory, and the order books

The theory is sound. Roughly 2,200 to 2,600 gigawatts of generation sit in US interconnection queues, and the wait from application to commercial operation has stretched from under two years in 2008 to more than eight years by 2025. PJM, the grid operator for 13 states, has signed interconnection agreements for 103 GW since 2020; only 23 GW has entered service. In December 2025 federal regulators ordered PJM to rewrite its rules for generation co-located with large loads — more studies, more engineering hours.

Scarce capacity should show up as booked work. It has, modestly. AECOM's backlog rose 13% to $27.82bn, on quarterly wins of $4.2bn and a book-to-burn ratio of 1.6x. Stantec, the Edmonton-based engineering and architecture firm, reported a record C$9.2bn, up 17.5% — but only 7% excluding acquisitions, and equal to 13 months of work. Tetra Tech, a water and environmental consultancy, ended at $4.49bn, up 5% in the quarter.

Now the builders. MYR Group, an electrical contractor that erects transmission lines and substations, lifted backlog 20% to a record $3.16bn. Quanta Services, the largest US transmission contractor, grew its book about 50% to $53.4bn. The designers are adding work at a third to a half the rate of the firms that follow them.

More telling: not one of AECOM, Stantec or Tetra Tech discloses power, transmission, interconnection or data-center work as a dollar line. AECOM's management called data centers its fastest-growing business and said its water and Department of Defense pipelines each expanded about 30% in the quarter, without quantifying any of it. Stantec's named win is the design of Meta's $13bn Alberta campus, inside a Buildings unit where backlog grew over 40% — with nearly eight of its 17.5 points of growth coming from 2025 acquisitions.

Quanta, meanwhile, bought Percheron, a firm doing permitting, routing and land acquisition, saying it should compress interconnection timelines. Its largest high-voltage corridors are, in management's words, mostly in engineering now, with backlog entry from late 2026 and field work in the second half of 2027. The front-end work is happening. The contractor is doing it in-house.

Tetra Tech's growth is not fee revenue

Tetra Tech has posted three straight quarters of accelerating revenue: up 1.1%, then 10.6%, then 13.5%. Gross profit fell in every one of them, most recently by 3.3%. Gross margin dropped 323 basis points to 18.6%. The growth is subcontractor pass-through, not billable engineering hours.

Its stated headwinds are almost entirely unrelated to AI: federal contracting offices short-staffed, offshore-wind cancellations, and the collapse of the US Agency for International Development, which had been 10.6% of fiscal 2025 revenue and whose shutdown struck roughly $1.1bn of awards from backlog against a $92m impairment. US commercial revenue grew 1% as wind cancellations offset data-center and mining gains.

The shares rose 35.8% over three months anyway. Price per dollar of trailing gross profit is now about 10.1x, against roughly 7.4x in late May — a 37% re-rating on gross profit that is roughly flat year on year. The forward price/earnings ratio of 23.5x sits above the trailing 22.2x, because consensus models fiscal 2026 revenue 3.5% below fiscal 2025.

AECOM and Stantec: the opposite shape

AECOM's operating leverage predates the charge — fiscal 2025 operating income rose 24.1% on flat revenue, lifting operating margin to 6.36% from 5.14%. The full-year adjusted EBITDA margin target went up to 17.4%. The shares are down 46.7% over twelve months. The offset is cash: management cut adjusted earnings guidance to $3.95-$4.15 against a consensus near $5.97, and the problem projects will consume roughly $500m of cash through the first half of fiscal 2027, with buybacks deferred.

Stantec earned a record 18.7% quarterly EBITDA margin and lifted trailing earnings to C$4.44 a share from C$3.83, with operating margin at 14.4% versus 9.4%. Its shares fell 31.5%. The blemish is organic net revenue growth of 3.7%, with US organic growth flat.

One technical note does argumentative work. Between 17 and 21 August, as the 30-year Treasury yield touched 5.33%, a 19-year high, the contractors fell about 9%. Stantec was flat and Tetra Tech rose. Whatever repriced the builders that week did not touch the designers — their year-long de-rating has company-specific causes, one per company.