Your GC is in Procore. Your owner is in Autodesk. Your data is everywhere.
The Data Center Boom Is Real — and It’s Not Slowing Down
Global data center spending surpassed $400 billion in 2024, is projected to top $500 billion in 2025, and McKinsey puts cumulative capex through 2030 at $6.7 trillion — with over $1 trillion flowing directly into construction (McKinsey, 2025; Investing.com, 2025). The driver is AI. Hyperscale and colocation facilities are expanding at a pace that has Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Meta committing capital at a scale the industry has never seen — and demand is spreading globally, with Asia Pacific posting the fastest regional growth at 20% annually.
For AEC firms, this is the work. Data centers have become one of the most active and demanding project types in the market — and with that comes a challenge that has nothing to do with the quality of anyone’s tools.
Many Teams. Many Platforms. One Project.
Here’s a scenario that’s become common:
A major data center owner-developer selects a GC that runs on Procore — submittals, RFIs, daily reports, change management, all of it. The owner’s project controls team lives in Autodesk Forma (formerly Autodesk Construction Cloud). The owner’s rep has their own environment. The commissioning agent has theirs. Each MEP sub is on whatever their company standardized years ago.
None of these teams chose the wrong platform. They chose what works for their organization and built real workflows around it. Nobody is rearchitecting their operation for a single project — and they shouldn’t have to.
Here’s the same problem one level down: the GC is in Procore, and a key mechanical sub is managing their work in Autodesk Forma. The sub needs to log RFIs, track submittals, manage their document set — all in their platform. The GC needs that same data in Procore. Without a connection, someone is manually re-keying data every time something moves.
The project doesn’t care about organizational boundaries. Submittals, RFIs, drawing revisions, change events — all of it needs to flow across every system involved. Without that, data lives in silos. And nobody has the full picture.
The data problem behind this is well documented. A 2022 FMI study commissioned by Autodesk found that bad data may have cost the global construction industry $1.85 trillion in 2020 alone — and that one third of all poor decisions on construction projects were made as a result of bad data (Autodesk/FMI, 2022). On data center projects the stakes of fragmented data are disproportionately high.
What Makes Data Centers Especially Vulnerable
Data center projects don’t just have more data — they have less room for error.
Compressed timelines. Hyperscale clients work backward from power-on dates. Every approval chain, every submittal, every change event is a potential critical path item. There’s no tolerance for lag between systems.
Equipment complexity. A single facility can involve thousands of submittals — generators, switchgear, UPS systems, CRAHs, PDUs — each with long lead times and multiple approval tiers. Tracking that across disconnected platforms is a project control problem, not a documentation one.
Multi-org project structures. Owner, owner’s rep, GC, MEP subs, commissioning agent, IT infrastructure team — all need different slices of the same data, in different systems. The org chart alone creates the conditions for fragmentation.
Program scale. These clients aren’t building one facility. They’re building programs across multiple regions, often with different teams on different platform standards. The cross-platform problem compounds with every project added.
The Manual Workaround Trap
The most common response to the cross-platform reality is also the most dangerous: duplicate data entry.
A coordinator pulls data from Procore, reformats it, and re-enters it into Autodesk Forma — or vice versa. Every manual transfer is an opportunity for error: a status transcribed wrong, a revision that doesn’t make it across, a change event that lands days late. Decisions get made on stale data. Issues surface late — on a project type where “late” can mean missed commissioning milestones and contractual penalties.
The labor cost across numerous re-entry touchpoints adds up. But the real exposure is version drift. The systems are never perfectly in sync, which means no one on the project ever has a fully reliable picture.
This isn’t a failure of the tools. Procore is excellent at what it does. So is Autodesk Forma. The problem is structural: each organization has its own platform, its own copy of the data, and its own version of what’s current. Without a connection layer, the gap is filled by humans — and humans are slow, inconsistent, and one bad day away from a costly mistake.
Bridging the Gap
What project teams actually need isn’t a replacement for either platform — it’s a data layer that connects them, so information flows to the right place automatically, without manual translation.
That means:
- Submittals syncing bidirectionally between Procore and Autodesk Forma in real time
- RFIs that don’t require a human handoff between systems
- Drawing revisions that propagate across platforms when issued in either
- Change events that surface everywhere without manual replication
- Configurable field mapping to bridge terminology differences between platforms
The goal isn’t to make both platforms identical — it’s to make the team functional regardless of which system they’re in.
ProjectReady WorkBridge: Built for How These Projects Actually Run
ProjectReady WorkBridge connects Procore and Autodesk Forma at the data layer — syncing submittals, RFIs, documents, and workflows in real time, so every team has a current copy of the data in the system they already use.
Nobody changes platforms. The GC stays in Procore. The owner stays in Autodesk Forma. The sub stays in theirs. WorkBridge keeps everything consistent — automatically, without re-entry, without anyone serving as the manual handoff.
Here’s what that looks like on a live project:
- A submittal created in Procore is instantly visible in Autodesk Forma — status updates flow back automatically
- An RFI on either side syncs to the other, so both teams always see current ball-in-court status
- Drawing revisions issued in one platform propagate to the other — no “which version is current?” conversation
- Change events in Procore surface in Autodesk Forma with no lag, no re-entry
- Field mapping is configurable, so platform terminology differences don’t create data gaps
Want to see it in action? Watch how WorkBridge syncs data across a live project →
For programs spanning multiple projects and regions, WorkBridge scales without rebuilding — the same connection logic that works for one facility deploys across the next ten.
The teams coming to us didn’t choose the wrong tools. They chose good tools. They just need those tools to share data — and WorkBridge is how that happens.
The Bottom Line
The data center boom isn’t a cycle. It’s a structural shift in how the world’s computational infrastructure gets built. The AEC firms winning in this space are operating at the pace these projects demand — and that requires getting data out of silos and into the hands of everyone who needs it, in the system they already work in.
Cross-platform data management isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a baseline requirement. The firms that build that capability now will be the ones in front of the right clients when the next program goes out to bid.
Interested in how WorkBridge handles Procore–Autodesk Forma integration on active data center programs? Get in touch with the ProjectReady team to see a live demo.