Up to 10% of all mass timber sold in the United States is now going to big tech for data centre and warehouse construction, with Amazon and Meta amongst the biggest players driving a new wave of cross-laminated timber and glulam projects across the United States. That is according to Vittorio Salvadori, Director of Mass Timber at TimberBLDR USA, who attended last week’s International Mass Timber Conference in Portland, Oregon.
The figure builds on observations David Stallcop, managing director of The Stallcop Group, made ahead of the conference — that mass timber is rapidly gaining traction as a structural system for data centres, offering speed, precision, and carbon performance that traditional steel-and-concrete systems struggle to match. “Mass timber is the smartest structural choice available right now for Data Centre construction,” Stallcop said, with prefabricated, CNC-cut panels arriving on site ready to install.
Addressing the conference on Thursday, Elizabeth Correa, Amazon Global Realty’s mass timber lead, joined sustainable development lead Case Blum to outline how Amazon is rethinking supply chains and procurement across campuses, warehouses, and data centre infrastructure at scale. Meta’s data centre designer, Matthew Smith, and sustainability programme manager, Lena Ohta, presented alongside them, with Sustainable Northwest president Dylan Kruse moderating.
Meta is using mass timber in its Aiken, South Carolina, Cheyenne, Wyoming, and Montgomery, Alabama data centres — building with SmartLam materials through DPR Construction and Fortis Construction, whilst Amazon’s Global Realty team pushed parallel pilots across campuses, warehouses, and data centre infrastructure.
Meta puts the embodied carbon reduction from replacing steel and concrete with mass timber at approximately 41 per cent for administrative buildings. The company has said plainly that “reaching scale for low-carbon alternatives like mass timber is the challenge for companies constructing the infrastructure of tomorrow.” Both, however, pointed to supply chain depth and cross-sector coordination as the binding constraints on accelerating that transition, with both identifying the next decade as the window in which those constraints either get resolved or cap how far the data centre timber pipeline can actually run.
The Portland conference — now in its tenth year and drawing more than 3,000 delegates — closed with the Amazon-Meta session, bookending a keynote programme that opened with a landmark address from Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, his first appearance at the world’s largest mass timber event. Both companies leave Portland having identified supply chain depth and manufacturing capacity as the constraints they expect to spend the next decade working through — and having made clear, in public, that they intend to keep buying.
