Why Meta is building its high-tech South Carolina data center with an old-school material

In a greenfield industrial park in rural Aiken County, South Carolina, Meta is building a new $800 million data center that’s much like any of the other hyperscale data centers giant tech companies are scrambling to construct. Set on 300 acres with two massive data halls making up most of its 715,000 square feet of buildings, it’s the kind of gargantuan facility that has become the de facto built form of the race to harness the lucrative power of artificial intelligence.

But past the sprawling data hall buildings, a comparably modest administration building has a unique design feature. Instead of the concrete and steel used in the data halls and countless other data centers around the world, the facility’s administration building is being made primarily of wood.

A grid of honey-toned glulam mass timber beams and columns rise out of the dirt on site, and more wood tops the structure that’s currently under construction. When the data center becomes operational in Spring 2027, this wood-framed building houses the offices of the humans who will keep the data center operational. And though the majority of the facility will be built using the conventional concrete and steel approach most designers and contractors are used to, this wood-framed building offers a glimpse of a slightly more sustainable future for data centers.

Mass timber is a material choice that has some clear upsides, especially when it comes to the negative optics of electricity-hungry, water-thirsty data centers. “Sustainably-sourced mass timber is a great fit for us because it has much lower embodied carbon than traditional materials like steel or concrete,” says Blair Swedeen, Meta’s global head of net zero and sustainability. (Meta has a goal of net zero emissions by 2030.) “Using mass timber helps us build in a way that’s better for the environment.”

It also helps build in a way that can be much faster than building with conventional concrete and steel. Swedeen says using mass timber, which is typically prefabricated to the specifications of a project, can speed up construction timelines, saving several weeks. And with less overall weight than a conventional structure, the foundation for a mass timber building needs only about half as much concrete for its foundation. “The use of mass timber brought several positive changes to the project,” Swedeen says.

The mass timber elements for Meta’s data center project were provided by Smartlam North America, a leading mass timber manufacturer in the still nascent U.S. market. Nick Waryasz, a senior mass timber specialist at the company, says mass timber has been mostly used in residential construction, but there’s been growing demand for more industrial uses. “The biggest draw for using timber in those instances has been the sustainability metrics of building with wood when it’s replacing steel and concrete, and having a team that has an interest in doing that, like some of these bigger tech companies,” he says.

Amazon, for example, recently opened a mass timber delivery station in Elkhart, Indiana, which the company hopes to use as a proving ground for using wood in future industrial projects. A data center being built by Microsoft is also using mass timber for part of its structure. Other data centers, currently in a building boom, are likely to follow. And not just for environmental reasons.

“I’ve had some early discussions on big industrial projects like data centers recently, primarily driven by the fact of how long lead times are for steel construction,” Waryasz says. “It’ll be over a year out to get any kind of steel structures on projects, when our lead times for similar projects might be six months.”

For the highly competitive AI industry, speed to market for data centers is increasingly important. That’s why Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg announced back in July that one way it was accelerating data center rollouts was by using easily-built large-scale fabric tents. Mass timber could be a slightly slower but more permanent alternative.

Mass timber could also help soften the harsh image of some of these hyperscale facilities. “It brings warmth to things that sometimes are inherently cold,” says Caroline Dauzat, fourth-generation owner of Rex Lumber, which provided the raw timber that Smartlam used to manufacture into structural elements for Meta’s project. She says mass timber represents only a tiny percentage of what her company’s wood is used for, but industrial projects could lead to growth. “It’s a marketplace to create more demand for lumber.”

Smartlam’s Waryasz says the mass timber industry is maturing to the point where industrial projects like data centers may opt for mass timber products automatically. “If they continue at their trajectory or anything close to it, it might even just become a supply question, with timber for construction being relatively abundantly available,” he says.

Meta’s use of mass timber on the data center project in South Carolina is just a small portion of the facility’s massive footprint, but future projects may embrace the material in a bigger way.

“We’re continuing to actively explore mass timber not only in our administrative buildings but also in warehouses and critical data halls, the spaces that house servers,” says Meta’s Swedeen. “Mass timber’s strength, durability, and fire resistance makes it a promising candidate for broader applications within data center infrastructure and we continue to evaluate these opportunities.”

View the full article