New orders for U.S. manufactured goods rose 1.5 percent in March to $630.4 billion, the Census Bureau reported on Monday morning, beating consensus forecasts of 0.5 percent and marking the fourth increase in five months. Inside the report, a single category did most of the work. Orders for computers and electronic products climbed 3.6 percent, the largest one-month gain since March 2001, on what the underlying detail tables describe as a surge in electromedical, measuring, and control instruments. That category has become the statistical proxy for the equipment going into AI data centers. Strip it out, and the headline looks materially weaker.
The Manufacturers’ Shipments, Inventories, and Orders survey (the M3) is a monthly Census report covering roughly 4,200 manufacturing companies with shipments of $500 million or more annually, plus a sample of smaller firms. The full report combines durable and nondurable goods; the durable-goods piece is published in advance about a week earlier. The March advance release, issued on April 24, was revised in Monday’s full report. The headline 1.5 percent figure is seasonally adjusted; the unadjusted dollar value of orders was about 4.9 percent higher.
What the surge actually was
Orders for nondefense capital goods excluding aircraft, the series the Bureau of Economic Analysis uses as its real-time read on business investment, rose 3.4 percent in March, revised up from the 3.3 percent in the advance release. That is the eighth month-over-month gain in the last nine, and the year-over-year increase is 9.4 percent, the highest annual reading since August 2022. Read by itself, that line says American business investment is accelerating. Read against the rest of the report, it says business investment in one specific thing is accelerating.
Durable goods orders, taken as a whole, fell 1.3 percent to $315.9 billion in March, pulled down by a 5.3 percent drop in transportation equipment. Inside transportation, nondefense aircraft and parts orders dropped 28.6 percent (Boeing’s month-to-month order book is volatile and one of the noisier series in the report), while defense aircraft and parts rose 16.9 percent, the fourth gain in five months. Nondurable goods orders, which the M3 only reports in the full release, rose 1.5 percent to $303.7 billion, with the largest contributions from petroleum and coal products and from chemicals. Unfilled orders for the manufacturing sector overall rose 0.1 percent to $1,540.9 billion, the 20th increase in 21 months. Inventories rose 0.6 percent to $956.3 billion, a sixth consecutive monthly increase.
Electrical work accounts for 45 to 70 percent of total data center construction costs, and the workers who do it are now the rate-limiting input. — International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers position paper, 2026
Why the numbers look like this
The composition of the March increase aligns with what construction-spending data and corporate filings have been telling a parallel story about. Census separately reported on May 1 that construction spending on data centers ran at a seasonally adjusted annual rate of $50 billion in March, up 34 percent from a year earlier. The Stargate Project, the $500 billion build-out announced by OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank in January and ratified by federal partnership in February, has begun placing orders for the kinds of switchgear, transformers, control panels, and precision instrumentation that flow through the electromedical and electrical-equipment lines of the M3. Dell’Oro Group, an industry tracker, forecasts that full-year 2026 data center capital expenditure will pass $1 trillion globally. The factory-orders data is the supply-side imprint of that demand.
There is a labor implication that follows directly. The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers estimates that electrical work accounts for 45 to 70 percent of total data center construction costs, depending on the design. A trade-press survey of 188 data-center equipment manufacturers and contractors conducted by Broadstaff in late 2025 found that 52 percent reported staff shortages serious enough to disrupt project schedules; the survey’s methodology is described on the firm’s public site, though the underlying respondent panel is not. Industry recruiters tracking the build-out estimate roughly 340,000 unfilled permanent data-center positions in the United States as of the first quarter of 2026, with electrical, mechanical, and commissioning roles concentrating the gap. Those numbers are sourced to a trade publication, Metaintro, that aggregates job-board postings rather than government data; readers should treat the figure as directional, not definitive.
What this means for the rest of manufacturing
For a factory that does not make the equipment AI data centers buy, the March report contains less encouragement. Transportation equipment’s 5.3 percent decline came on top of a weak February in commercial aerospace. Primary metals orders rose only 0.4 percent. Fabricated metal products rose 0.8 percent, in line with the broad average. Furniture and related products, a category that tracks the consumer housing cycle, rose 0.6 percent, better than February but still well below the pace of the AI-adjacent lines. The Federal Reserve’s industrial production index, last released for March, showed manufacturing output up 0.3 percent on the month, a number that aligns with the dollar-orders picture once aircraft volatility is set aside.
The split shows up in employment, too. The Institute for Supply Management’s Manufacturing Employment subindex, reported last Thursday for April, fell to 46.4 percent, the fifth consecutive month in contraction. ISM panelists in the April release said 60 percent of surveyed firms were managing head counts rather than hiring; of those, 34 percent reported using layoffs. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is scheduled to publish the April Employment Situation report on Friday, May 8; manufacturing payrolls were down 7,000 in March, with electrical equipment and computer/electronic products the only two manufacturing subsectors adding jobs.
What it means for households
For a household trying to read the report, the practical translation is in two pieces. The first is that the strong headline does not mean a generalized factory rebound: outside the AI capex line, manufacturing is roughly flat. The second is that the build-out is creating a real, narrow labor market in skilled trades that pay well. Compensation surveys from electrical contracting firms put senior commercial electricians on data-center projects in the range of $110,000 to $140,000 per year before overtime; those figures come from contractor-recruiting firms and reflect posted offers, not BLS wage data, which will not catch up for another quarter.
What to watch next
Three releases will sharpen the picture. The BLS Employment Situation for April, scheduled for Friday, May 8, will show whether the contraction in the ISM manufacturing employment subindex has reached payrolls. The Census advance durable-goods report for April is scheduled for May 26. The BEA releases personal income and outlays, including the PCE price index, on May 30. The Federal Open Market Committee, which held rates at a range of 4.25 to 4.50 percent on May 14, next meets on June 17; officials there will read these numbers exactly as the rest of us do, with the caveat that they have to decide what a manufacturing recovery driven by a single buyer means for the path of monetary policy.