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Market research · November 4, 2026

AI Data Center Construction Deaths and Injuries Statistics: 2026 Report

By Darin ten Bruggencate, Founder, AI Industry Reviews

Our analysts compiled every death and injury at a US data center construction site that we could confirm in a primary record or a news report we opened directly. We searched OSHA's Severe Injury Reports file, which runs from January 2015 to November 2025, for addresses and employer descriptions tied to data center projects. We then added deaths and injuries from local news, court filings, and state OSHA letters, and compared the results with Bureau of Labor Statistics figures for construction overall.

The race to build AI computing capacity has turned farmland and industrial parks in Texas, Georgia, Ohio, Indiana, and Tennessee into sprawling construction sites. At Stargate's first campus in Abilene, Texas, Oracle told TIME that about 8,000 people had worked 20 million hours. Some of the workers on these projects did not go home. Since 2025, local news outlets, court filings, and safety regulators have recorded deaths at data center sites built for Amazon, Meta, xAI, QTS, Vantage, and others. No federal dataset counts those losses, so we built one.

In the following sections, we break down deaths and injuries by year, state, cause, site operator, and contractor, then look at OSHA inspections and penalties at data center sites and at how data center incidents compare with fatality and injury rates for construction as a whole.

Why Every Count Here Is a Minimum

Before any totals, it helps to know what public records can and cannot show about these sites.

OSHA's data does not flag data centers. Construction employers report under codes such as NAICS 236220 (commercial and institutional building) or 238210 (electrical contractors), the same codes used for hospitals, schools, and warehouses. A data center injury appears in OSHA files only when the address or narrative happens to identify the project. Many reports give only a street address or a description such as "jobsite" (Source 2).

The Severe Injury Reports file also covers only states where federal OSHA has jurisdiction. Indiana, Tennessee, and Virginia run their own state plans, so injuries at data center sites in those states do not appear in it (Source 2). The file ends Nov. 30, 2025, and it records hospitalizations, amputations, and eye losses, not deaths. OSHA's fatality records were not machine-readable for us: the agency's inspection search returned access errors, its fatality page is an embedded dashboard, and the Labor Department's enforcement API requires a registered key.

Deaths that never reach the news also cannot be counted here. That means the 19 incidents in our dataset, including 8 deaths, are a floor, not an estimate of the true toll.

Key Findings

• Our count rests on what reached public records and local reporting. A death or injury at a site that drew no coverage and no identifiable OSHA report is missing by design.
• Employer injury logs have known gaps of their own. TIME cited a 2004 study funded in part by NIOSH estimating that official logs missed between 33% and 69% of work-related injuries and illnesses, and a 2009 GAO report finding disincentives to record injuries (Source 3).
• For policymakers, the gap is structural. Until OSHA or the states tag data center projects in their records, no one can calculate an injury rate for this type of construction.

Data Center Construction Deaths and Injuries by Year

Counting incidents by the year they happened shows when the documented toll rose.

Our dataset holds 19 incidents from September 2019 to September 2026: 8 deaths and 11 injuries (Source 1). Of the 11 injuries, 7 come from OSHA Severe Injury Reports, each involving a worker who was hospitalized. The other 4 come from TIME's review of lawsuits, an Indiana OSHA letter, and local news.

Documented deaths and injuries at US data center construction sites by year of incident

Source: AI Industry Reviews incident dataset (Source 1). Deaths are counted in the year of the incident. Alexis Vicent was injured in August 2025 and died in February 2026.

Source: AI Industry Reviews analysis of OSHA Severe Injury Reports, state OSHA records, court filings, and local news, data through Oct 22, 2026 (Source 1).

Key Findings

• Every dated death happened in 2025 or 2026; the two Ohio deaths were reported without dates.
• The 2026 figures cover less than ten months and none of the Severe Injury Reports data, which ends in November 2025. Hospitalizations in 2026 that never reached the news are not included.
• For anyone tracking this trend, the 2025 jump comes partly from reporting. Four of the 10 incidents that year are at Stargate in Abilene, the subject of a TIME investigation built on OSHA files and lawsuits.

The Workers Who Died

Each of the eight deaths we confirmed is listed below, with what the public record says about how it happened.

Deaths at US data center construction sites, 2025 to 2026

Sources: Loudoun Times-Mirror (Source 11); Data Center Dynamics (Sources 4, 5, and 12); Action News 5 (Source 8); KSAT and ENR (Sources 6 and 7); KTXS (Source 9); ENR (Source 10).

Anthony Riera Azuaje contacted energized wires or conduit while working on a light fixture from a scissor lift. His family has sued Allison-Smith Company over the temporary power fittings and grounding at the site (Sources 4 and 5). Alexis Vicent's family filed a wrongful-death suit on Sept. 11, 2026, seeking $30 million (Source 8). Christopher Lawe, a married father of two from Ponca City, Oklahoma, was struck by a Mortenson pickup carrying workers at the end of the day, and Mortenson temporarily halted work (Source 10).

Key Findings

• Three of the eight deaths involved vehicles or mobile equipment on site: an articulating truck, a semi-trailer, and a pickup. Two were falls, one an electrocution, one a trench collapse, and one a crushing whose details were not reported.
• Texas and Ohio each account for two deaths, and the other four occurred in four different states. The deaths happened at sites tied to at least six named operators, from Amazon and Meta to Rowan and Vantage.
• For contractors, the pattern points to site traffic and fall protection as the first controls to check. Those two hazards cover five of the eight deaths in our dataset.

Deaths and Injuries by State

Where an incident happened also shapes whether it gets recorded, because some states keep their own injury files.

Texas has the most incidents, with 7, driven by five injuries at Stargate in Abilene and two deaths elsewhere in the state (Source 1).

Documented incidents by state

Source: AI Industry Reviews incident dataset (Source 1); OSHA Severe Injury Reports coverage (Source 2).

Source: AI Industry Reviews analysis of OSHA Severe Injury Reports, state OSHA records, court filings, and local news, data through Oct 22, 2026 (Source 1).

Key Findings

• Every injury we found in the federal Severe Injury Reports came from Texas, Georgia, Ohio, or Oklahoma. States with their own OSHA plans show only deaths and incidents that reached the news or a published state letter.
• Indiana, Virginia, and Tennessee together show 4 incidents, 3 of them deaths. Injuries short of death in those states surface only through state letters or the press.
• For state regulators in Indiana, Tennessee, and Virginia, publishing severe injury reports in the federal format would make these sites comparable with the rest of the country.

Deaths and Injuries by Cause

Sorting the incidents by how each worker was hurt, using the event groups BLS uses for its fatality census, shows which hazards to plan for.

We assigned each incident to a BLS event group from the description in the source record. Where the record did not say how the injury happened, we coded it as not determinable (Source 1).

Documented incidents by cause

Source: AI Industry Reviews incident dataset (Source 1).

Key Findings

• Falls and contact with objects each account for 6 incidents. The contact injuries include the 1,400 pounds of glass panels that fell on a worker's leg at Stargate and a chain thrown from a ladder that struck a delivery driver's head (Source 3).
• We found no heat-related death at a data center construction site. TIME reported 911 calls about possible heat stroke and dehydration at Stargate's first Abilene site, and noted that at least 53 Texas workers died from heat-related illnesses between 2010 and 2021 (Source 3).
• For safety managers, the mix matches construction's familiar hazards, not anything unique to data centers. Fall protection, rigging, and equipment controls cover most of the incidents in this table.

Deaths and Injuries by Site Operator and Contractor

Grouping the incidents by the company building or leasing each campus, and by the contractors named in the records, shows where responsibility sits.

Stargate in Abilene, developed by Crusoe for Oracle and OpenAI, has the most documented incidents at a single campus, with 5 injuries. Andre Guthrie, 61, was found dead at the first Abilene site on Oct. 1, 2025; DPR said his death was unrelated to workplace conditions, police were awaiting autopsy results, and OSHA told TIME it was "not aware" of the fatality. We did not count his death (Sources 1 and 3).

Contractors and employers involved in documented incidents

Sources: OSHA Severe Injury Reports (Source 2); TIME (Source 3); DCD (Sources 4 and 5); KSAT and ENR (Sources 6, 7, and 10); Action News 5 (Source 8); Indiana OSHA (Source 13).

Source: AI Industry Reviews analysis of OSHA Severe Injury Reports, state OSHA records, court filings, and local news, data through Oct 22, 2026 (Source 1).

Key Findings

• Amazon sites account for 3 incidents, including the two Ohio deaths, and Google sites for 2 injuries. Google's site in LaGrange, Georgia, saw a worker hurt on a roof about 50 feet up on April 3, 2026, who was flown to a trauma center in serious but stable condition (Sources 2, 12, and 14).
• Being sued or cited is not the same as being found responsible for a death. Several suits remain pending, and defendants including DPR have denied the allegations (Source 3).
• For developers, the contractor chain matters. TIME found that responsibility for safety on Stargate's first campus was spread across a web of contractors and subcontractors, with injury logs kept by site managers, not by OSHA (Source 3).

OSHA Inspections, Citations, and Penalties at Data Center Sites

Inspections and penalties are the main public check on these sites, so we collected every regulatory action we could confirm.

We confirmed two federal OSHA penalties, one Indiana OSHA citation and one Tennessee OSHA finding. Together, the two federal penalties were proposed at $26,674 and settled at $13,000 (Sources 3 and 13).

Confirmed OSHA and state OSHA actions at data center construction sites

Sources: TIME (Source 3); Indiana OSHA letter of Jan. 22, 2026 (Source 13); Action News 5 (Source 8). Inspection numbers for the Abilene cases come from OSHA Severe Injury Reports (Source 2).

Debbie Berkowitz, a former OSHA adviser, told TIME it was "highly unusual for OSHA to vacate a citation, especially when the settlement agreement confirms there was a hazard that the company agreed to abate" (Source 3).

In Indiana, the inspection came after a complaint from Local 150 of the operating engineers union. The complaint cited police video of a worker who "reportedly fell nearly 70 feet" from the roof. Indiana OSHA found no evidence that the worker struck his head, but it did cite the roofing employer (Source 13).

Key Findings

• The final federal penalties total $13,000 across two serious injuries that involved fractured femurs, a pelvis, a tibia, and a fibula. That is less than half the $26,674 OSHA first proposed.
• For several deaths, the public record shows only that OSHA or the state was investigating. We could not confirm citations or penalties for the deaths at QTS, Rowan, Meta, Vantage, or Amazon's Ohio sites, because OSHA's inspection search was not accessible to us.
• For anyone weighing enforcement, these amounts are small next to project budgets. The Rowan campus alone is a minimum $900 million investment, according to ENR (Source 7).

How Data Center Incidents Compare With Construction Overall

National figures for all US construction give the data center incidents a baseline.

Construction is one of the most dangerous industries in the country. In 2024, 1,034 construction workers died from work injuries, a fatal injury rate of 9.2 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers, compared with 3.3 for all workers (Sources 15 and 16).

Fatal work injuries in 2024, construction and related industries

Sources: BLS Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024 (Sources 15, 16, and 17). BLS publishes detailed industry rates only in spreadsheet form, so we report counts for those rows.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024 (Sources 15 and 16).

Key Findings

• Construction workers died at 2.8 times the rate of all workers in 2024. Transportation and warehousing (12.2), mining (13.8), and agriculture (20.9) had higher rates, while manufacturing was at 2.4 (Source 16).
• Commercial and institutional building construction, the BLS group closest to data center general contractors, recorded 58 deaths in 2024. Falls caused 25 of them and transportation incidents 15 (Source 17).
• For readers comparing risk, our 8 deaths cannot be turned into a rate. No source counts the hours worked on all US data center sites, so we do not compare them with 9.2 per 100,000.

Construction fatal injuries by event, 2024

Source: BLS CFOI 2024, table A-1 (Source 17). Shares are our calculation from the reported counts; the six events sum to 1,032 of the 1,034 deaths.

Source: US Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, table A-1, 2024 (Source 17).

Key Findings

• Falls lead construction deaths nationally, and BLS reported that fatal falls among construction and extraction occupations declined to 370 in 2024 from 400 in 2023 (Source 15).
• Transportation incidents rank second nationally and first among our eight data center deaths, with three. Near Meta's Hyperion campus in Louisiana, thousands of dump trucks and 18-wheelers head to the site each day, and a dump truck driver died in a road crash there that we did not count because it happened off site (Source 20).
• For contractors bidding on AI campuses, the national data sets the baseline hazards to plan for. Fall protection and traffic separation address the two largest causes of death in construction.

Nonfatal Injury Rates and Severe Injury Reports

Nonfatal injury rates and OSHA's severe injury reports show how often construction workers are hurt without being killed.

BLS reported 2.2 recordable injury and illness cases per 100 full-time workers in construction in 2024, against 2.3 for all private industry. Construction's rate of cases with days away from work, job restriction, or transfer was 1.3 (Sources 18 and 19).

Nonfatal injury and illness rates, 2024

Source: BLS Survey of Occupational Injuries and Illnesses, 2024, table 1 (Source 19).

OSHA severe injury reports, construction and commercial building, 2015 to 2025

Source: AI Industry Reviews count of OSHA Severe Injury Reports by employer NAICS code, federal OSHA states only (Source 2).

Key Findings

• Construction's nonfatal rate sits near the private-industry average, while its fatality rate is 2.8 times the all-worker rate. Recordable case rates alone understate how dangerous construction work is.
• Severe injury reports from construction employers peaked at 1,969 in 2018. The 2025 count of 1,639 covers only 11 months, yet it already exceeds every full year from 2021 to 2024.
• For anyone relying on Oracle's claim that Stargate recorded incidents at a rate "approximately 2.5x lower than industry norms," the underlying data has not been shared. Oracle declined to provide it to TIME, and DPR and Crusoe did not respond (Source 3).

What Data Center Construction Safety Figures Mean for Workers and Developers

The documented record shows at least 8 workers killed and 11 injured while building US data centers, with 14 of the 17 dated incidents in 2025 or 2026. The causes are the familiar ones in construction: vehicles and equipment moving among workers on foot, falls from height, a trench wall, and an energized line. What is different is the size of the AI campuses: some 8,000 people have worked at Stargate's first Abilene campus alone (Source 3).

The record is also thin by design. OSHA does not tag data center projects, three of the states in our dataset keep their injury reports out of the federal file, and fatality records sit behind interfaces that cannot be searched in bulk. The two federal penalties we confirmed for serious injuries at Stargate ended at $13,000 in total.

So if you are a developer, contractor, or local official approving an AI campus, ask for site-level injury data, traffic plans, and fall protection plans before work starts, and make them public when incidents happen.

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