4,000 workers. One campus.
Zero transit system.

DataBank's Red Oak campus in Ellis County, Texas sits on 292 acres. When complete, it will house eight two-story data centers totaling 3.4 million square feet and delivering 480 megawatts of power. The first phase alone — three buildings — is backed by $2 billion in construction financing, the largest single deal in the company's history. (DataBank / CoStar)

To build it, DataBank will put 4,000 to 5,000 workers on the site at peak construction. That's not a crew. That's the population of a small town.

And here's what Tony Qorri, DataBank's Vice President of Construction, said about managing workers at that scale: a crew of 20 to 50 workers in a factory can be more productive than managing thousands on a sprawling campus, "where workers lose two hours daily just commuting to and from the site." (DataBank Construction Predictions 2026)

Two hours. Not commuting to the campus from home. Commuting within the campus — from the parking area to the active work zone, from the work zone to the break trailer, from the break trailer back to the work zone, from the work zone to the tooling area. Walking across 292 acres of active construction, multiple times per shift, every shift, every day.

On a campus that large, the walk from the parking lot to the far side of the site can be a mile. Round trip, that's two miles — twice a day if you count the lunch break. On foot, across terrain that's under active construction: unpaved roads, heavy equipment zones, utility trenches, material staging areas, and haul routes shared with concrete trucks, crane transports, and flatbed deliveries.

The scale changed. The people-moving didn't.

Five years ago, a large data center construction site had 750 workers at peak. The campus was smaller. The buildings were fewer. The distances were manageable. Workers parked near the building they were working on, walked to their zone, and spent the day within a reasonable radius of their tools and their vehicle.

That world is gone.

DataBank's Red Oak is not an outlier. It's the new baseline. Across the country, data center campuses are being built at a scale that didn't exist three years ago:

The Stargate initiative — a consortium including Oracle, SoftBank, and OpenAI — committed up to $500 billion to build AI data centers across Texas, New Mexico, Ohio, and the Midwest. These aren't individual buildings. They're multi-building campuses spanning hundreds of acres. (Construction Dive)

JLL's 2025 Data Center Outlook reported that 90% of operators cite staffing shortages as a critical constraint on their ability to build and expand. (Data Center Geeks / JLL)

The Uptime Institute's Global Data Center Survey found that 53% of operators report difficulty finding qualified candidates — up from 38% in 2018. (Uptime Institute / Wesco)

The AGC/Sage Construction Hiring survey found that data center construction leads all segments with a 57% net positive reading for 2026 — higher than any other building type in the country. 65% of contractors expect the data center market to expand this year. (AGC / Roofing Contractor)

The buildings are getting bigger. The campuses are getting wider. The crews are getting larger. And the method for moving those crews around the site hasn't changed at all.

It's still feet. Workers walk.

What 4,000 workers walking looks like

Picture this: 4,000 workers arrive for the morning shift at a 292-acre campus. They park in a staging area at the perimeter of the site — because the interior is active construction, and you can't have 2,000 personal vehicles parked between the crane pads and the transformer yards.

From the parking area, they walk. Some are heading to Building 1, the closest structure — maybe a quarter mile. Some are heading to Building 4, the farthest — a mile or more, depending on which side of the campus their scope of work is on. Electricians heading to the switchgear room on the far end of Building 3 walk past three other buildings under construction to get there. HVAC crews heading to the mechanical yard walk through active concrete pours and rebar staging areas.

The walk takes 15 to 30 minutes, depending on the destination. Each worker makes this walk at least twice per day — start of shift and end of shift. Many make it four times — add the walk to and from the break trailer at lunch, and the walk to the tooling container or the material staging yard when they need supplies.

At 15 minutes per walk, four walks per day, that's an hour of walking. At 30 minutes per walk for the workers assigned to the far side of the campus, it's two hours — exactly the number Qorri cited.

Now multiply that by 4,000 workers. If the average worker loses 90 minutes per day to internal site transit, that's 6,000 person-hours lost every single day. Over a 250-day construction calendar, that's 1.5 million person-hours per year — consumed not by construction, but by walking to and from construction.

At an average loaded labor rate of $65/hour for skilled trades, that's $97.5 million in annual labor cost that produces zero constructed square footage. It's the most expensive walk in the construction industry — and nobody budgets for it because nobody has named it.

Until now. The name is internal site transit. And it's a problem that grows with every acre you add to the campus.

The safety dimension

A 292-acre construction site with 4,000 pedestrians is a safety environment that most EHS programs weren't designed for.

Traditional construction safety focuses on fall protection, electrical hazards, trenching, crane operations, and material handling. These are well-understood risks with well-established protocols. But when you add 4,000 pedestrians walking across active haul routes, crossing between heavy equipment zones, and sharing unpaved roads with concrete trucks and flatbed deliveries, you introduce a category of risk that scales with the size of the site and the number of workers on foot.

Qorri acknowledged this directly: "Managing 4,000-plus workers on a single site can lead to safety challenges that didn't exist at smaller scales. Setting clear rules and maintaining safety protocols becomes critical when construction sites rival small cities in population." (DataBank Construction Predictions 2026)

Every pedestrian crossing of an active haul route is a conflict point. Every worker walking through a material staging area is an exposure event. Every shift change — when 2,000 workers are walking in and 2,000 are walking out, through the same corridors, past the same equipment, at the same time — is a peak-risk window.

A fixed-route tram system that moves workers from the parking area to designated drop-off points near each building — on a path that's separated from haul routes, visible to equipment operators, and operating on a posted schedule — fundamentally changes the pedestrian safety profile. Instead of 4,000 individual pedestrians making 4,000 individual routing decisions across 292 acres, you have consolidated, predictable, scheduled movement along a designated corridor.

It's the same principle that applies at stadiums, festivals, and cruise terminals: consolidate pedestrian traffic onto a controlled route instead of dispersing it across an active operational area. The difference is that at a data center construction site, the "active operational area" includes cranes, excavators, and 80,000-pound concrete trucks.

They're already solving every problem except this one

The data center construction industry is throwing extraordinary resources at every constraint it faces — except internal site transit.

Labor shortage? Companies are importing workers from other states, paying per diem and relocation costs, and partnering with trade schools to build pipelines. DataBank noted that workers are relocating from Arizona, where power constraints slowed construction, to booming markets like Dallas. (DataBank Construction Predictions 2026)

Housing? Companies are building temporary worker villages adjacent to construction sites — full-service compounds with meal service, gyms, and recreational facilities — because the commute to remote campuses is so brutal that workers won't take the jobs. Corporate Mobile Housing markets these facilities specifically to data center developers, arguing that eliminating long commutes "reduces fatigue, burnout, and accidents." (Corporate Mobile Housing)

Medical care? Leading operators are installing onsite health clinics at construction sites. One data center operator partnered with Medcor to establish a clinic that treated 91% of worker injuries onsite, reducing ER visits and saving $1.4 million. (Medcor)

Construction efficiency? The industry is accelerating modular construction and prefabrication — building electrical components, power rooms, and entire building modules in controlled factory environments and shipping them to the site, specifically because factory settings avoid the productivity losses of on-site work. Qorri said it directly: a crew of 20-50 in a factory outperforms thousands on a sprawling campus.

Financing? DataBank alone has raised $4.7 billion in the past year. BCG estimates the global data center industry plans $1.8 trillion in expansion by 2030.

The industry is solving the labor problem, the housing problem, the medical problem, the construction methodology problem, and the financing problem. It has not solved the problem of moving 4,000 workers across 292 acres of active construction every day.

That's the gap.

What a transit system does on a mega-campus

A FlexTram deployment on a data center construction campus works the same way it works at a festival, a stadium, or a cruise terminal — with one critical difference: the route changes as the build progresses.

Phase 1: During site preparation and foundation work, the route runs from the parking staging area to the active work zones, with stops at the break trailers, the tooling containers, and the material staging yard. The route is long because the work is spread across the full site.

Phase 2: As buildings go vertical, the route consolidates. Drop-off points are positioned near the building entrances that are under active construction. The tram delivers workers directly to their building, eliminating the walk across the campus.

Phase 3: During commissioning and fit-out, the route shifts again — connecting the operational zones with the construction zones, which may be on opposite sides of the campus. Workers move between finished and unfinished areas on a schedule that avoids conflict with live equipment testing.

The route evolves with the project. The vehicles don't change. The driver training doesn't change. The operational model — fixed routes, posted schedules, designated stops — doesn't change. The only thing that moves is the route map, which is updated as the construction sequence progresses.

This is the same deployment flexibility that makes FlexTram work at events and venues — no permanent infrastructure, no construction required, route changes in hours, not weeks. The difference is the timeline: instead of a three-day festival, the deployment runs for 18 months to three years, matching the duration of the construction program.

The math that justifies itself

If 4,000 workers lose an average of 90 minutes per day to internal site transit, and the average loaded labor rate is $65/hour, the daily cost of walking is $390,000.

Over a 250-day construction year: $97.5 million.

Over an 18-month build: $146 million.

A FlexTram deployment running four to six vehicles on a continuous loop across the campus, with drivers operating on two shifts, costs a fraction of that figure.

If the tram system recovers even 30 minutes of the 90 minutes lost to walking — converting that time from transit to productive construction work — the ROI is measured in days, not months.

The calculation isn't complicated. It's just never been done — because the walk has always been accepted as part of the job. Nobody questions it because nobody has quantified it. And nobody has quantified it because nobody has named it.

Internal site transit is not a convenience. On a 292-acre campus with 4,000 workers, it's a line item — whether you budget for it or not.