Kentucky announced $10.5 billion in new private-sector investment in 2025, the state’s second-best year on record, spread across 185 new-location and expansion projects projected to create nearly 9,600 full-time jobs. That comes from the Kentucky Cabinet for Economic Development and the Office of the Governor (Dec. 18, 2025, https://newkentuckyhome.ky.gov/Newsroom/NewsPage/20251218_Gov._Beshe). Manufacturing alone accounted for close to $9.5 billion of that total and roughly 7,600 of the announced jobs. The average incentivized hourly wage tied to these projects hit a record $29.58.

A general contractor or facility lead with a Kentucky groundbreaking on the calendar this year is not planning in isolation. Whatever share of those 185 projects breaks ground in the same window is drawing on the same regional pool of electricians, low-voltage technicians, and network engineers. The question is not whether Kentucky is growing. It is what that growth does to anyone else trying to finish a building on schedule at the same time.

The scale is real, and it is still just announcements

The $10.5 billion figure describes intent, not completed construction. A project on that list might break ground in 2026, get resized before a shovel moves, or in some cases not proceed at all. The state’s release is a tally of new-location and expansion commitments made during calendar year 2025, not a count of concrete poured or systems installed. Read it for what it is: a signal of how much project volume is moving through site selection, permitting, and design at once, not a guarantee of how much of it becomes a finished building.

Even discounted for that gap, the volume is worth taking seriously. Kentucky does not publish a separate figure for how many of the 185 announced projects are under construction on any given date. What the announcement total does establish is direction: more projects entered the pipeline in 2025 than in almost any year on record, and some share of them are pouring foundations, running conduit, and hiring crews in Kentucky and Southern Indiana right now.

A separate fiber build-out is pulling on the same trades

Kentucky’s factory boom is not the only construction competing for labor. The Fiber Broadband Association, working with RVA LLC, reported that US fiber providers passed 11.8 million new homes in 2025, an all-time record, bringing total fiber-to-the-home passings to 98.3 million, over 60% of US households (Dec. 2025, https://fiberbroadband.org/2025/12/16/fiber-broadband-association-reports-historic-fiber-deployment-highs/). The association projects fiber will overtake cable as the dominant US broadband platform as early as 2028.

That count is residential broadband construction: homes passed, not commercial or industrial fiber demand, and it says nothing directly about what a factory floor or a distribution center needs. Used correctly, it shows that fiber construction activity nationally is running at a record pace. Some of the same underground and aerial construction crews, splicing technicians, and cable supply chains a Kentucky facility depends on are already committed to that build-out, and it has nothing to do with manufacturing.

Data center construction is climbing on top of both

A third source of demand sits above the first two. ConstructConnect estimates US data center construction starts reached $77.7 billion in 2025, up 190% year over year, with average monthly spending on new starts rising from roughly $500 million in mid-2021 to $6.5 billion in December 2025. The firm was tracking 76 more data center projects worth over $88 billion set to start within six months of its report (Feb. 2026, cited in Equipment World, https://www.equipmentworld.com/market-pulse/article/15816534/data-center-construction-boom-to-grow-in-2026).

That estimate comes from ConstructConnect’s own proprietary project tracking, not a government count. The US Census Bureau’s construction spending data does not break data centers out as a separate line item, so there is no official federal figure to check it against, and the number should be read as directional rather than audited. Directional is enough to make the point. A manufacturer with no data center ambitions of its own is still drawing from the same pool of electricians, low-voltage technicians, and network engineers as a category of construction that is growing faster than almost anything else in the country and can pay a premium for schedule certainty.

What breaks once the facility is running

The decisions made during a build do not stop mattering once the ribbon is cut. Uptime Institute’s Annual Outage Analysis 2025 found that networking and IT issues caused 23% of impactful data center outages in 2024, up from prior years and tied to rising network complexity and change-management and misconfiguration problems, even as overall outage frequency and severity kept declining for a fourth consecutive year (May 2025, https://uptimeinstitute.com/about-ui/press-releases/uptime-announces-annual-outage-analysis-report-2025). Power stays the single largest cause of impactful outages. Human error tied to failure to follow procedures rose 10 percentage points in 2025 versus 2024, and nearly 40% of organizations reported a major human-error outage in the past three years, 85% of which traced back to ignored or inadequate procedures.

Power design still deserves the most attention on a project. That is not in dispute. But the network and cabling layer is a real and growing share of what takes a facility down after it opens. It is not the leading cause. It is not marginal either. A build that treats low voltage as whatever the electrical crew has time for after the panels are set is choosing to carry that risk into occupancy.

What to lock down early in a build

This is the part a facility lead or GC can act on before any statistic above matters to their own project.

1. Settle conduit and pathway sizing in the same meeting as the electrical rough-in, not after it. Low-voltage conduit added once electrical trades have already claimed the accessible chases means core drilling, exposed raceway, or a change order later.

2. Fix the telecom or IT room location and size before the walls around it go up. A closet sized for today’s rack count, with no room for a second cabinet or additional patch panels, becomes a problem the day the facility adds a production line or a security upgrade.

3. Decide the fiber entrance point and route, underground or aerial, as part of the site civil plan, not after paving. Trenching or boring after the parking lot is finished costs more and takes longer than the same run planned into the original site work.

4. On a multi-building site, plan the conduit runs between buildings during site work. A distillery campus or a factory with a separate office building is the clearest case: adding a conduit path between two buildings after both are occupied means digging up finished ground.

5. Lock device counts and locations for fire alarm, access control, and cameras early enough that they drive the rough-in, rather than being reverse-engineered into wherever conduit already happens to exist.

6. Settle the design scope directly with whoever is doing the installation, instead of commissioning a full outside engineering package sized for a much larger build. An over-engineered system that specifies more device than the budget supports usually gets cut down under time pressure, late in the project, when there is the least room to do it well.

Phasing the work so low voltage doesn’t become the critical path

Pathway and sleeve work belongs in the site and structural phase, alongside underground electrical and plumbing, while trenches are still open and slabs are not yet poured. Rough-in for fire alarm, network, and security cabling belongs on the same schedule line as electrical rough-in, before insulation and drywall close the wall cavities and before ceiling grid goes in. Device trim and terminations happen once finishes are close to done but before furniture and equipment move in, so testing is not competing with other trades for access to the same space. Testing and commissioning, pulling cable certifications, testing fire alarm devices, verifying camera coverage, need their own line on the schedule before occupancy, not squeezed into the final few days.

None of that sequencing is unusual on its own. What changes the stakes is the backdrop against it: $10.5 billion in announced projects moving through Kentucky’s pipeline and an estimated $77.7 billion in data center construction starts tracked nationally in 2025. A low-voltage contractor with open capacity on short notice is a smaller pool to draw from than it was two years ago. A project that locks in its rough-in window early gets a crew scheduled around it. A project that treats low voltage as something to figure out once the GC has a free week gets whoever is left.

What this looks like when it is handled well

Versys designs and installs fire alarm, low voltage, security, and network infrastructure for factories, distilleries, and commercial builds across Kentucky and Southern Indiana, from Fort Campbell to Covington and Paducah to Pikeville. The projects that go smoothly are the ones where fiber routing, conduit sizing, and the telecom room get settled with the integrator during the site and structural phase, alongside the trades that are already committing to a schedule, rather than being scoped out after the fact by an outside engineering firm sized for a build twice this one’s scale. That sequencing is what keeps a network buildout from becoming the reason a production line ships late.

Anyone with a Kentucky groundbreaking scheduled for the next year should get low-voltage scope in front of an integrator before the electrical rough-in schedule is finalized, not after. Call (270) 358-2200 to talk through what a specific site needs.