QTS Hillsboro data center buildings, Hillsboro, OR, USA Credit: Hrach Hovhannisyan via Shutterstock.com Feeding, housing and entertaining the people who build AI data centers could be worth $3.2bn a year to catering companies by 2032, Bloomberg reported, citing analysts at Bloomberg Intelligence. Aramark, Compass Group and Sodexo have already been engaged to carry out jobs ranging from laundry to providing food service throughout the day. The report includes sites that are still under construction as well as campuses that are already in operation. The analysts who have produced the forecast, Stuart Gordon and Evgeniy Batchvarov, believe that several years of strong demand lie ahead.
As they expand throughout the US, people expect data centers to require more catering, cleaning and building maintenance. Aramark is the one that has acted most quickly; in August it said that contracts for data centers should generate additional revenue of between $400 million and $500 million during its 2027 and 2028 financial years. Aramark has announced that it will manage the dining, gym, and entertainment facilities at a data center project in Texas that employs more than 4,000 people. Citi analysts believe the deal will generate approximately $100m in annual revenue once fully operational.
The offer, marketed as Nexus, is designed to help developers attract scarce tradespeople. It bundles housekeeping, meals, transport and fitness. “Statistics are saying that the country will be short about 500,000 skilled laborers by 2028,” Aramark chief executive John Zillmer told an investor conference this month. Bloomberg Intelligence expects Aramark to take about 35% of the market, Compass about 30% and Sodexo roughly 20%. Sodexo is smaller in this area, but it signed a deal with Meta in July to cater its offices, data centers and conference venues worldwide.
Chief executive Thierry Delaporte called the growth opportunity significant. Compass said its segment covering hyperscalers, the largest cloud companies, is growing fastest. Its chief executive, Dominic Blakemore, argued that the gains will also reach the builders and manufacturers that supply these projects, many of which already use Compass. “If you start with Aramark, it looks like the opportunity is real,” Citi analyst Leo Carrington told Bloomberg. The surge will not be permanent, since Bloomberg Intelligence predicts that annual revenue will peak in 2032 before dropping by around half due to a slowdown in construction.
Carrington pointed out that caterers’ revenue fluctuates with the number of workers on site, which is why the building phase is the most important. The amount involved is enormous; in July, a group led by BlackRock completed the $40 billion takeover of Aligned, and this week, Samsung invested $1 billion in Helix, the company that builds AI data centers. According to a September New York Times/Siena poll, 61% of American voters opposed the construction of new data centers, up 12 percentage points from a previous survey. By July, over 500 towns in the United States had banned such buildings.
Carrington stated that, since those pressures existed alongside requests from the heads of AI labs to slow development, investors are now assessing the caterers contract by contract.
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