The latest US restrictions on DJI, the world’s largest drone maker, are causing uncertainty in the construction industry, where the Chinese brand has long dominated the skies above job sites and now accounts for more than 90 percent of drones used in the sector.
Construction companies across the United States have come to rely heavily on drones for tasks such as site surveys, progress monitoring and safety inspections, which help cut costs, improve decision-making and increase efficiency. The uncertainty over access to DJI’s latest models has left many operators scrambling for answers.
“It’s the new models that have not been released for sale in the US that regulators are stopping us from purchasing,” Nino Efendic, president of Aerial Prospex LLC, a US-based drone service provider, told China Daily.
“We’re trying to spread the word about what DJI products do and what the industry needs and advocating for the construction industry in general,” said Efendic, whose company operates a fleet of 42 DJI drones.
Colin Guinn, CEO of Guinn Partners, a US contract engineering and consulting firm, said the import restrictions had generated concern and uncertainty across the industry.
“We get a lot of questions: Hey, what do we do next? What do we do now? We’ve just grounded our entire DJI fleet. What does this mean for us going forward? Is this going to be long term?” Guinn told attendees during a talk at ConExpo, North America’s largest construction trade show held recently in Las Vegas.
According to Guinn, DJI has accounted for 95 percent of the construction drone market in the US over the past decade.
He noted that the company had solved “some really challenging parts” of drone technology, including link reliability, flight control, vision systems and the integration of real-time kinematic positioning — a high-precision geolocation technology critical for professional survey work.
Guinn pushed back on suggestions that the solution was simply to build a domestic replacement. “You don’t understand how complicated that proposition is. There’s so many different technologies that have to be solved for that to happen,” he said.
The challenge for construction specifically, Guinn explained, was that unlike in content creation, drone data used on job sites must meet survey-grade standards, requiring ground control points, real-time kinematic or post-processed kinematic positioning, high-quality telemetry, accurate metadata and precise alignment across all images.
When switching to regulator-approved alternatives, users would find those products “are a lot more expensive and heavier; they’ve got fragmented software stacks, and they just don’t have the same kind of DJI level of polish,” he said.
Non-DJI alternatives can cost two to 10 times as much for comparable capabilities, according to an analysis by ABJ Drone Academy, a drone training provider. DJI has long benefited from Chinese manufacturing scale and the cost efficiencies that come with it, according to an analysis of the latest DJI ban.
One Florida police department, the analysis found, was forced to spend $25,000 on a single Skydio drone to replace units that had cost roughly $5,000 each from DJI.
A white paper published on Feb 28 by the Oregon Department of Aviation, based on responses from 25 states, found that recent federal restrictions on DJI had triggered widespread disruption across the country, including interruptions to survey, mapping and construction workflows, as well as near-term funding gaps for procuring compliant replacements.
DJI has been under US national security scrutiny for several years. In December 2024, Congress passed legislation that, rather than imposing an outright ban, gave any US national security agency one year — until Dec 23, 2025 — to conduct a formal security audit of DJI. If no such review was completed by the deadline, the law mandated that DJI be automatically added to the Federal Communications Commission’s “Covered List” of restricted communications equipment.
No US agency volunteered to carry out the audit by the deadline, and DJI’s new models have since been subject to import restrictions. In February, DJI filed suit challenging the FCC decision, asserting that the agency exceeded its statutory authority and failed to produce evidence of an actual national security threat.
The construction industry is undergoing a transition from two-dimensional blueprints to three-dimensional digital models, and drones will be a big part of the shift, said Guinn.
However, Efendic noted that much of the current funding and innovation drive in the US drone industry remained focused on defense applications rather than commercial sectors such as construction and agriculture, which were not a priority at this stage.
As few companies were investing heavily in research and development for those fields, any meaningful solution would most likely come from DJI, he said.
DJI drone ban disrupting US construction sector
