By Dr. Atif Ansar

I've just returned from PTC'26 in Hawaii, and one phrase kept surfacing in the conversations I had with operators, investors, and leaders alike:

"We’ve got to hit our timelines."

Of course, we were talking about demand, capital, customers, NIMBYism, and power. But the biggest constraint for CEOs worried about a shakeout in 2026 was execution and delivery.

And more precisely: time.

The industry has scaled construction volume 10-20x in five years. Timelines have compressed, and projects have grown more complex. And we're hitting a wall. This industry has no shortage of ambition, but we're still treating time as an operational detail instead of recognizing it as our most critical asset.

If we fundamentally change how we think about project delivery management in 2026, we'll look back on this as the year the industry got serious about execution. If we don't, we'll remember it as the year we learned an expensive lesson.

The Scaling Problem Everyone's Feeling

Let me put the challenge in perspective.

Five years ago, when we gathered at conferences like PTC, total data center construction volume across the United States was around 500 megawatts annually. Today, single companies are building 500 megawatts in a single year. Some are targeting even more aggressive expansion.

The industry has scaled 10-20x in volume.

However, the labor force hasn't scaled 10-20x. Neither has project management capability, supply chain capacity, or the coordination infrastructure needed to deliver at this pace. We're asking the same systems to handle fundamentally different loads.

The cracks are showing.

Two Warning Signals from the Market

At the end of last year, we saw two stories that have crystallized why execution risk has become the defining issue for 2026.

Firstly, Oracle's stock dropped sharply in early January after reports that financing talks for its one-gigawatt Michigan campus had stalled, with an experienced investor citing delay concerns and extended payback periods.

Oracle denied the claims and announced discussions with other eager investors. But the damage to the share price was already done.

That's the signal. Not whether the delay concerns were accurate, but that rumored timeline risk alone triggered a market reaction.

Secondly, in December, I wrote about CoreWeave's earnings call (read the full analysis here). Despite doubling revenue year-over-year, the company's operating margins compressed from 20% to under 4%.

The culprit? Infrastructure delays.

Delays are symptomatic. They reveal fragmented information flows, coordination failures across trades, optimism bias in planning systems, and a gap between what developers believe is happening and what's actually unfolding on site.

The pattern across both Oracle and CoreWeave is consistent: strong demand, abundant capital, but execution uncertainty. And the market is punishing that uncertainty.

Why Projects Look Fine Until They're Not

Here's what I find most striking: in both cases, the delays likely came as no surprise to people closest to the work. Someone on the ground probably saw the warning signs weeks or months earlier.

So why did that information fail to surface in time for corrective action?

This is a systems problem, not a people problem.

On-site delivery teams have deep experience and prefer autonomy. They're confident they can handle emerging issues without escalating concerns (confidence earned through years of successfully solving problems). But complexity accumulates, sometimes beyond the point of recovery.

Project controls teams are frequently under-resourced or disconnected from real-time decision-making. By the time they identify meaningful variance, corrective action has become prohibitively expensive or impossible.

Senior executives focus outward: on capital allocation, customer relationships, investor communications, and strategic growth. Construction gets delegated to specialists.

The result? Everyone acts rationally within their role, but the system suppresses early warning signals until they become unavoidable. Progress reports show green. Leadership operates with confidence. Then a delay materializes seemingly overnight.

We felt it coming. We just lacked a mechanism to surface the signal before it became a crisis.

The Three Lines of Defense

So, how do you deal with this? The most successful organizations I've observed are adopting a governance model borrowed from risk management: the three lines of defense.

The concept is straightforward. The first line does the work. The second line provides independent review and challenge. The third line gives executive approval and strategic direction.

Applied to data center delivery, here's how it works:

First Line (Execution): On-site teams develop and maintain construction schedules day-to-day. They have the autonomy to execute but operate within clear standards. They own the work.

Second Line (Review): A centralized project controls or PMO team independently reviews schedule quality, validates progress against plan, and surfaces emerging risks. Their job is explicitly to counterbalance optimism with reality. They challenge assumptions, test logic, and escalate variance while it's still manageable.

Third Line (Approval): Senior leadership approves critical milestones and baseline changes, ensuring delivery decisions reflect portfolio-level trade-offs between time, cost, and risk. They're deeply engaged in strategic decisions that govern delivery outcomes.

The power of this model lies in successive layers of protection. There’s no single point of failure. No reliance on one person or one team to catch everything.

In my experience, most organizations discover that the second line is the weakest. They have capable execution teams. They have engaged leadership. But they lack a systematic mechanism (with real authority and independence) to surface problems while they're still solvable.

That's the gap that turns small variances into major delays.

What Monday Morning Looks Like

At PTC, Barbara Mitchell, Chief Operating Officer from JSA asked me in an interview: "What should I actually do when I get back to my desk on Monday?"

Here's my answer.

First, shift your mindset.

Start thinking about time as your core asset, not an operational detail. Time governs everything: your valuation, your revenue recognition, how lenders perceive you, your reputation with customers. In the iron triangle of scope, cost, and time, we've been over-obsessed with cost. But time is the foundation on which everything else is built.

Second, ask yourself: who is your Chief Time Officer?

Someone in your organization needs to own schedule performance across your portfolio the way your CFO owns financial performance. Is it your COO? Head of construction? Project director? Maybe it's you.

Then ask the harder question: do they have the data, tools, and authority to actually execute that role effectively? Or are they managing schedules with spreadsheets and tacit knowledge while your finance team operates with real-time systems and structured reporting?

Third, ask a diagnostic question that reveals where your system is most likely to fail:

If your organization were to implement a three lines of defense model tomorrow, which line would require the most adjustment: execution, review, or approval?

If execution is weak, you lack standardized scheduling practices and your teams are operating in silos.

If review is weak, you lack independent challenge capability, or it's under-resourced and disconnected from decisions that matter.

If approval is weak, senior leadership has over-delegated construction and lacks visibility into emerging risks until they become crises.

That answer tells you where to focus first.

Why This Matters in 2026

We're entering a critical phase for the industry.

Capital remains abundant for data center infrastructure. Demand continues to grow. But financing terms are tightening. Investors are repricing execution risk. Credit default swaps are rising. Lenders are requiring stronger covenants.

Companies with proven delivery track records will access better financing terms, attract more sophisticated capital partners, and command premium valuations.

Everyone else will face increasing friction. Worse terms. More onerous conditions. In some cases, inability to secure financing at all.

What we're seeing in the market signals a broader repricing. The era where you could get funded purely on demand forecasts and ambition is over. Execution capability is now the differentiator.

The winners will be determined by who actually delivers on their commitments, not by who announces the biggest projects or commits to the fastest timelines.

Execution is the constraint. Time is the asset. 2026 is the year to get this right.

I'd welcome your perspective: which line of defense is weakest in your organization – execution, review, or approval? Leave me a comment or reach out to discuss how we're helping owners turn visibility into action before variance becomes crisis.

— Atif