Four dollars an hour. That's what Todd Weaver earned at age 12 for picking up trash on a construction site in Missouri. That day, he knocked on the door of a construction site bungalow and it was Bob Clark, founder of Clayco and future construction billionaire, who hired him. Forty-three years later, his group is targeting nearly a billion dollars in turnover in 2026, driven by the data centers it is building for Google, says Forbes.
The same wave is sweeping away Bitcoin miners, who rent their megawatts to artificial intelligence giants. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta are pouring sums into concrete and silicon that the construction industry has never seen.
Key Points
Hired at age 12 for $4 an hour by Bob Clark, founder of Clayco, Todd Weaver heads a construction group that is targeting $1 billion in revenue in 2026, compared to around $400 million in 2025.
Its teams are building data centers on six Google campuses and also count Microsoft and Apple among their clients
Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta now plan more than $700 billion in investments in 2026, up from around $410 billion in 2025
Bitcoin miners monetize their electrical connections: IREN with Microsoft, Cipher Mining with AWS, Riot Platforms with Anthropic
Todd Weaver: From Trash Picker to Billion Dollar Group
Todd Weaver's first salary was a handful of bills: four dollars an hour to remove rubble and packaging in Hazelwood, in the suburbs of Saint-Louis. Bob Clark hires him on one condition, that he stay at school. The founder of Clayco, one of the largest manufacturers in the United States, became his mentor for years.
In 2002, at age 31, Todd Weaver launched his own business. Its holding company, DGN Enterprise, today brings together five companies, including TW Constructors and subsidiaries specializing in electricity, glazing and fire protection, for 585 employees. Turnover increased from around $400 million in 2025 to nearly a billion expected in 2026.
The driving force behind this leap is Google, which has entrusted it with data center projects on six campuses. Microsoft and Apple are also among its clients. In the AI value chain, concrete arrives before silicon: no GPU turns on without a cast slab, without a connected transformer and without a cooling loop.
Data centers: the bill for cloud giants exceeds $700 billion
Behind these projects, four principals crush all the others. Amazon, Microsoft, Alphabet and Meta have invested around $410 billion in 2025. After their second quarter results, published at the end of July, their cumulative forecasts now exceed $700 billion for 2026, most of which is aimed at servers, chips and the buildings that house them. The markets also reacted in mixed order to this bidding war.
The appetite does not stop in the United States. In September, Google announced at least 13 billion euros in Finland for its data centers and their power supply.
However, the site is running into trouble. The Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates that the median time between a request for connection to the American electricity grid and commissioning is almost five years. An already powered site is then worth more than the servers it will house.
Bitcoin: miners sitting on the megawatts that AI demands
These megawatts already connected, Bitcoin miners hold hundreds of them. IREN delivered its first data center to Microsoft this summer, as part of a $9.7 billion contract for Nvidia GB300 chips installed in Childress, Texas. Cipher Mining closed 5.5 billion with Amazon Web Services, after a lease guaranteed by Google via Fluidstack. TeraWulf claims more than $12.8 billion in contracted revenue in high-performance computing.
The movement is still accelerating. In late September, Riot Platforms secured a 20-year lease valued at $9.1 billion with Anthropic for its Rockdale, Texas, location. A year earlier, Core Scientific shareholders had rejected CoreWeave's takeover offer, valued at $9 billion in shares.
For ten years, these companies did the thankless work: negotiating long-term electricity contracts and setting up at the foot of substations that no one wanted. This electrical heritage has become one of the most contested assets in American tech, to the point that certain miners could derive 70% of their income from AI by the end of 2026.
Mining has not disappeared, but it is marking time. The network hashrate, the total computing power mobilized to validate the blocks, peaked at around 930 EH/s in September, below the symbolic bar of 1 ZH/s. According to BlocksBridge Consulting, listed miners reduced their power by 15% in the first half of 2026, while their AI revenues surged.
