Brian Potter
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
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What they believe
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It has virtually never got cheaper to build a house or an office: construction costs rise at or above general inflation, in every rich country and over a century of data.
Construction costs tend to rise at, or above, the level of overall inflation, and it rarely (if ever) gets cheaper to build houses, offices, or other buildings.
construction-physics.comSaid 23 Apr 2026This on korrents
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Changed their mind American data centres consume about 66 million gallons of water a day, a small fraction of what they withdraw.
Before Taking this into account, actual water consumed by data centers is around 66 million gallons per day.
Now So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and significantly underestimated US data center water consumption.
Said 30 Aug 2025This on korrents
The bold line is korrents’ wording; the quote is theirs. These one: what they wrote before what they said aloud, one per source, newest first.
Beliefs
Korrents What they believe 43 beliefs, 1 changed mind — each backed by an exact quote.
Each is a — compiled by korrents.com, not by them: the one-line wordings are korrents', the quotes are theirs.
Recent
It has virtually never got cheaper to build a house or an office: construction costs rise at or above general inflation, in every rich country and over a century of data.
Construction costs tend to rise at, or above, the level of overall inflation, and it rarely (if ever) gets cheaper to build houses, offices, or other buildings.
Construction Costs Rarely Fall Said 23 Apr 2026
Stagnant construction productivity is not an American failure but a worldwide one, and most rich countries that once had it have lost it.
Overall, my take when looking at this data is that stagnant construction productivity is an extremely widespread problem.
Stagnant Construction Productivity Is a Worldwide Problem Said 11 Dec 2025
Factory-built construction has not raised productivity: the countries that prefabricate most, Sweden and Japan, have had flat construction productivity for decades.
Sweden, for instance, is often praised for its high adoption of prefabricated construction, but since the 1990s Sweden has had roughly flat construction labor productivity, even as it has made more extensive use of prefabrication.
Stagnant Construction Productivity Is a Worldwide Problem Said 11 Dec 2025
Show 40 more
America can copy other countries to reach the frontier of what building already costs elsewhere; nobody knows how to push that frontier forward.
The US has a lot to learn from other countries for how to catch up to the efficient frontier, especially for certain types of construction (ie: transit) and in certain places in the country (ie: expensive coastal metros).
Stagnant Construction Productivity Is a Worldwide Problem Said 11 Dec 2025
The published estimates of data-centre water consumption rest on accounting choices that push the number as high as it will go.
However, the methods used to produce these estimates are debatable, and seem to have been chosen to give the maximum possible value for data center water consumption.
I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption Said 30 Aug 2025
Cut and cover is still often the cheapest way to build a subway and rich countries have abandoned it anyway, because the disruption is no longer tolerated.
Cut and cover will sometimes be the best choice from a basic cost-benefit perspective, as will elevated rail, and both are useful to have in the tunnel construction toolbox for that reason.
Why we stopped building subways cheaply Said 28 May 2025
American cities chose subways over elevated railways knowing they cost two to four times as much, because nobody would live under an el.
Cities began to prefer subways to elevateds, despite the fact that they were two to four times as expensive to build as elevated trains.
Why we stopped building subways cheaply Said 28 May 2025
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money.
Political costs and civic opposition will often make a technology unviable regardless of how the dollars and cents add up.
Why we stopped building subways cheaply Said 28 May 2025
The high-purity quartz of Spruce Pine is a real chokepoint in chipmaking, but not an irreplaceable one.
Spruce Pine quartz isn’t quite an irreplaceable linchpin in semiconductor manufacturing.
Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz? Said 8 Nov 2024
Synthetic quartz could replace mined high-purity quartz at five to ten times the price, which chipmakers could absorb.
The downside is that synthetic quartz is much more expensive, perhaps on the order of 5–10 times the cost of natural high-purity quartz.
Does All Semiconductor Manufacturing Depend on Spruce Pine Quartz? Said 8 Nov 2024
American shipbuilding has been uncompetitive for a century; it is not a recent decline.
The situation we face today, with U.S. ships costing at least twice as much to build as ships built elsewhere, is not a recent development; it’s been the norm for at least the past 100 years.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
Commercial shipbuilding keeps moving to whichever country has the cheapest labour, and America has never been that country.
Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
What has kept American shipbuilding uncompetitive is the high cost of its inputs, above all labour and steel.
The first is the high cost of inputs, particularly labor and steel.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
Inventing a manufacturing technology and building a competitive industry on it are separate achievements, and America has repeatedly done only the first.
But in turning these innovations into competitive industries, America has come up short.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
Sheltering an industry from competition is not the same as making it competitive, and American maritime policy has only ever done the first.
Shipbuilding policies have long been much more focused on sheltering the industry from competition rather than driving to make it successful.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
Whether a country builds ships well comes down to whether it actually wants to compete internationally, and America never has.
The U.S., on the other hand, never appears to have been strongly motivated to make its shipbuilding industry an international success.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
Wartime shipbuilding surges have never left America with a commercial shipbuilding industry afterwards.
But the U.S. again failed to transform its enormous shipbuilding effort into a successful commercial shipbuilding industry.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
American shipbuilding capacity has collapsed to a rounding error beside China's.
The U.S. Navy estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times our own.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
Available power, not land or capital, is what now limits how many data centres get built.
In particular, operating a data center requires large amounts of electricity, and available power is fast becoming the binding constraint on data center construction.
How to Build an AI Data Center Said 10 Jun 2024
Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade.
Conventional air cooling is likely limited to around 20 to 30 kilowatt racks, perhaps 50 kilowatts if rear heat exchangers are used.
How to Build an AI Data Center Said 10 Jun 2024
The efficiency gains that kept data-centre electricity use flat for a decade are largely spent, so new demand now arrives as new power demand.
But many of these gains have already been achieved: the best data centers already use just 10% of their electricity for cooling and other non-IT equipment.
How to Build an AI Data Center Said 10 Jun 2024
Data-centre electricity consumption will rise substantially even after allowing for every efficiency gain now in sight.
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
How to Build an AI Data Center Said 10 Jun 2024
Data centres and the grid that feeds them run on incompatible clocks: one is a two-year project, the other a multi-decade investment.
Utility companies see major electrical infrastructure as a long-term investment to be built in response to sustained demand growth.
How to Build an AI Data Center Said 10 Jun 2024
A semiconductor fab is mostly its tools; the building around them is the cheap part.
Roughly 70-80% of the cost of a new fab will be the process tools that go in it.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab Said 3 May 2024
Every new process node makes a fab about 30 per cent more expensive to build than the one before it.
For modern semiconductor fabs, each new process node increases fab cost by about 30%.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab Said 3 May 2024
Lithography machines alone cost about as much as the entire building put up to house them.
The cost of lithography machines is often estimated as 20% of the cost of a new fab, which means that lithography tools can cost as much as the entire fab facility itself.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab Said 3 May 2024
Fabs take roughly a third longer to build in the United States than in Asia, largely because of environmental review.
Fab construction time in the US has increased from just over 650 days on average in the 1990s to over 900 days on average in the 2010s, compared to around 600-700 days in Asian countries, in part because of increasingly stringent environmental review processes.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab Said 3 May 2024
The chip industry split into fabless designers and a handful of foundries because fabs got too expensive to own, not because anyone chose that structure.
But as fab costs increased, it became more and more burdensome for manufacturers to operate cutting edge manufacturing facilities due to the high costs, and fewer manufacturers had the production volume to spread those costs over.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab Said 3 May 2024
A semiconductor fab costs what it costs because it is a mass-production factory that has to hold atomic precision around the clock.
The second is that producing semiconductors requires almost unfathomable levels of precision.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab Said 3 May 2024
The same law that made chips cheaper made the factories that produce them enormously more expensive.
These enormous costs are ultimately due to the same factor that has steadily driven down the cost of semiconductors: Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of components on an integrated circuit tends to double every two years.
How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fab Said 3 May 2024
For most American housing the largest cost is putting up the physical building, not the land it sits on or the rules attached to that land.
Discussions of housing policy often focus on issues of zoning, regulation, and other supply restrictions which manifest as increased land prices, but for most American housing, the largest cost comes from building the physical structure itself.
What Makes Housing So Expensive? Said 2 Apr 2024
It is only in dense cities that land dominates the price of a home, and there the land is expensive because of the rules limiting what can be built on it.
It’s only in dense urban areas that the cost of land begins to dominate the cost of new housing, driven by regulatory and zoning restrictions that limit how much housing can be built in a given area.
What Makes Housing So Expensive? Said 2 Apr 2024
Building materials are already about as cheap as civilisation knows how to make them, so cheaper materials are not where housing savings will come from.
Bulk building materials are already mass-produced in factories, and are among the cheapest materials civilization is capable of producing.
What Makes Housing So Expensive? Said 2 Apr 2024
A house is built by trades that barely coordinate with each other, which is what makes housing cheap to design and almost impossible to redesign.
What is different about construction is the level of coordination that takes place: whereas in a car everything is carefully designed to tightly integrate together, in housing construction the work can be done (and often is) with surprisingly little coordination between the various trades.
What Makes Housing So Expensive? Said 2 Apr 2024
How much a metro builds relative to its population growth does not predict its rents; across the hundred largest US metros the correlation is essentially zero.
There is essentially zero correlation - the metros with the largest rent increases had added population / added housing ratios no different than metros with smaller rent increases.
Is There a Housing Shortage or Not? Said 11 May 2022
The United States really is short several million homes, and the shortage shows up as a historically low vacancy rate rather than as too few homes per person.
So, historical evidence suggests that the US is short at least several million housing units.
Is There a Housing Shortage or Not? Said 11 May 2022
You cannot infer a housing shortage from how much a country is building, because how much it needs to build changes with its demography.
If there’s one thing to take away from this essay, it's that you can’t infer a housing shortage by looking at housing construction rates in isolation.
Is There a Housing Shortage or Not? Said 11 May 2022
The tighter a metro's restrictions on land use, the higher its rents; this is the strongest relationship anyone has found in the housing data.
The more restrictions on land use, the higher rents you see.
Is There a Housing Shortage or Not? Said 11 May 2022
Rents adjust to match what a region earns, which is why cities with flat or falling populations still get more expensive.
There’s a reasonable amount of evidence that housing prices tend to adjust to match regional incomes.
Is There a Housing Shortage or Not? Said 11 May 2022
Most apparent trends in American housing are the Bay Area in disguise: a handful of outlier metros drive the correlations people quote.
In general, housing trends are largely driven by a small number of outlier metros.
Is There a Housing Shortage or Not? Said 11 May 2022
Builders reject new building systems rationally: a change to the process raises the odds of a catastrophic overrun by more than the innovation can save.
A new or innovative system that involves changes to the process thus incurs a significant risk penalty that would likely exceed the expected benefits of the innovation.
Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction Said 30 Jun 2021
A contractor's upside on a job is a single-digit margin and the downside is the whole company, and that asymmetry is why construction is conservative.
The upside of any given project is usually a single-digit profit margin. But the downside is “whatever your company is worth”
Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction Said 30 Jun 2021
The person who specifies a new building system carries all its risk and none of its reward, a reverse moral hazard that keeps construction innovation out.
In many cases, the person specifying a new system won’t capture the upside from actually using it - they’ll be under a sort of reverse moral hazard, where the benefits accrue to the rest of the project team, but the risks will accrue only to them.
Why It's Hard to Innovate in Construction Said 30 Jun 2021
Beliefs others hold too
The binding constraint on building anything in America is permitting and litigation, not money. 3 hold this
Political costs and civic opposition will often make a technology unviable regardless of how the dollars and cents add up.
Why we stopped building subways cheaply Said 28 May 2025
Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade. 3 hold this
Conventional air cooling is likely limited to around 20 to 30 kilowatt racks, perhaps 50 kilowatts if rear heat exchangers are used.
How to Build an AI Data Center Said 10 Jun 2024
American shipbuilding capacity has collapsed to a rounding error beside China's. 2 hold this
The U.S. Navy estimates that China’s shipbuilding capacity is 232 times our own.
Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships? Said 5 Sept 2024
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Recommends rcmnd
rcmnd What they recommend 3 things — each backed by an exact quote.
Compiled by rcmnd.app, not by them: the quotes are theirs, and each links to the post it was copied from.
Recent
Liked Form Follows Finance
A great look at the economics of early skyscraper construction and its influence on aesthetics, with the only downside being that it mostly doesn't cover the late 20th century when modernism was taking hold.
construction-physics.com 18 Jan 2025
Loved How Real Estate Developers Think
By far the best book I've read about real estate development.
construction-physics.com 18 Jan 2025
Loved High Rise
This is the exact sort of book I love, narrative-ish nonfiction written by a journalist who nails both the prose and the factual details. High Rise tells the story of the construction of 1540 Broadway, mostly from the perspective of the developer Bruce Eichner.
construction-physics.com 18 Jan 2025
Where they publish
Newsletter Construction Physics Why physical things cost what they cost -- fabs, data centres, power plants, the grid. Weekly.
His newsletter on construction and industrial productivity, and the source of most of what he is quoted on.
Recent
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Show 17 more
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- Where Has Construction Automation Been Successful? 11 Sept 2026 Construction is famously labor intensive: direct labor makes up close to 50% of the cost of constructing a new single-family home in the US, compared to around 6 to 8% of the cost of manufacturing a car.
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- How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part III 3 Sept 2026 This is my third and final essay looking at the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, and how it’s likely to affect housing supply.
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- How Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Affect Housing Supply? Part II 14 Aug 2026 This is the second installment of my look under the hood of the recently passed 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act, looking at what each provision actually does and trying to suss out its actual impact on housing supply.
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- What Will the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act Do for Housing Supply? 6 Aug 2026 A few weeks ago the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law. This is an enormous housing bill that’s been in the works for roughly a year — I first discussed it on Statecraft back in 2025 — and folks are optimistic…
Link verified 8 Sept 2026. Recent items update automatically from the channel.
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