Conexpo Draws 140,000 as Equipment Manufacturing Adds $415B to U.S. GDP and Data Center Boom Continues

Last week, I visited a parallel universe called Conexpo. It’s a world ruled by construction equipment, and it only appears every three years. Imagine a city skyline shaped by cranes and asphalt mixing plants. Picture booths, like city blocks, filled with every kind of iron from every kind of industry, connected by concrete and carpeted avenues filled with people. Listen closely and hear earthmoving machinery clanking in the distance. The proper name for this realm is Conexpo-Con/Agg.

Last week, its planned reappearance attracted 140,000 construction professionals from 128 countries to Las Vegas. The event spanned more than 3 million square feet of exhibit space. The Construction Equipment team crisscrossed this space-time machine continuum, generating enough content until the next Conexpo. We’ll be writing and posting these stories for the foreseeable future, so stay tuned.

AEM gave us an update on the equipment manufacturing industry   

The first thing I did at Conexpo was to visit with the Association of Equipment Manufacturers, which owns and runs the event. AEM discussed new economic data focused on the U.S. equipment manufacturing industry. Commissioned by AEM and prepared by S&P Global Market Intelligence, the report quantifies the industry’s direct, indirect, and induced contributions to the U.S. economy across things like sales activity, GDP contribution, labor income, and tax revenues.

“As our industry gathers here in Las Vegas, I'm proud to say that the manufacturers, parts, and service providers at Conexpo-Con/Agg, along with the manufacturers of farm equipment, who also make up AEM's membership, support a total of 2.2 million jobs across the United States,” said Megan Tanel, president and CEO of AEM at a preshow press conference.  

“The equipment manufacturers added $415 billion — billion with a B — to the gross domestic product of the United States in 2025,” continued Tanel. “This represented 1.4 percent of 2025 total nominal GDP in the U.S. The GDP contribution by the industry was similar and larger than those of Chile, Egypt, and Portugal.”

How tariffs and data centers are impacting the construction equipment industry

AEM has already detailed how equipment makers feel about U.S.-imposed tariffs. The off-highway machinery sector has spent the last year dealing with higher input costs and trade uncertainty. Tariffs on parts and components have raised domestic manufacturing costs and made U.S.-made equipment less competitive at home and abroad. I heard a similar message at Conexpo.

Tanel was joined on a press panel by Brian Bieller, president of Bomag Americas Inc., and Kip Eideberg, senior vice president of government and industry relations at AEM.

“Tariffs directly impact imports, not exports,” said Bieller. “However, as we've seen, countries targeted by tariffs have retaliated, increasing their tariffs on U.S. produced goods, and thus impacting U.S. exports as well. You can see here a chart with the top 10 U.S. construction equipment importers and the top 10 equipment export destinations. Interestingly, the top 10 importing countries remain the same as 2022. For the top export destinations, Germany is new in 2025, and we lost Russia due to sanctions. Still, there is reason to be optimistic. The boom that data centers posted with construction spending [increasing] by 59.1 percent in 2023, 55.5 percent in 2024, and expected 37.4 percent in 2025. It's still impactful because of the construction of new chip and fabrication plants and electric vehicle battery factories, which were incentivized by the CHIPS Act in 2022 and Inflation Reduction Act in 2023. Further, the One Big, Beautiful Bill Act is expected to accelerate project schedules due to new tax credits and 100 percent bonus depreciation for construction equipment.”

More iron, more insight, more stories ahead

Conexpo may pack up after five days in Las Vegas, but the ripple effect lasts for months. And if you couldn’t walk every aisle of the show — or even if you did — there’s still a lot more to uncover. Our team captured an enormous amount of material during the week. Booth walkarounds. Machine launches. Technology demos. Conversations with product managers, engineers, contractors, and fleet leaders. We filled memory cards, notebooks, and voice recorders with enough information to keep the Construction Equipment newsroom busy for quite a while.

In the coming weeks, expect a steady stream of coverage across our website, newsletter, and video channels. In short, Conexpo might be over in Las Vegas, but the story of what debuted there is just getting started. So keep an eye on ConstructionEquipment.com, our YouTube channel, and our social feeds. The machines, the technology, and the ideas that will shape the next three years of construction equipment are just beginning to surface. And we’ve got a lot more iron to unpack.