Data centers run on concrete and steel, and both carry a heavy carbon load before a single server powers on. Meta is trying a different recipe. The company is putting mass timber and low-carbon concrete into its data center campuses, and the early numbers give contractors something concrete to evaluate rather than another vendor pitch.
How mass timber changes the data center build
Meta is using cross-laminated timber and glue-laminated beams in administrative buildings at campuses in South Carolina, Wyoming, and Alabama. The reported result is roughly 41% lower embodied carbon than conventional steel-and-concrete construction. The structural payoff is the part builders should notice: mass timber’s lighter weight can cut foundation concrete by up to half, which can speed foundation work and trim material spend.
The flagship example is Meta’s 22nd U.S. data center, going up in Aiken County, South Carolina. It’s an $800 million-plus investment across a 715,000-square-foot campus supporting around 100 jobs, and Meta says it marks a deliberate break from its standard concrete-and-steel template. The company isn’t stopping at offices either. Executives say they’re evaluating timber for warehouses and the critical data halls themselves, leaning on the material’s strength-to-weight ratio and the char layer that gives heavy timber its fire resistance.
Why the concrete math still matters most
Timber gets the headlines, but concrete is where the volume is. Cement production accounts for roughly 8% of global emissions, so the bigger lever for most projects is the mix design. Meta says substituting proven supplements like fly ash can lower concrete’s carbon intensity by up to 20% below regional baselines without hurting structural performance. Design choices help too: cutting concrete in duct banks and thinning slabs with gravel fill can drop a footprint by more than 30%.
The company is also running an AI model to tune concrete mixes for strength, cure time, and emissions at once, and claims reductions as high as 70% on specific pours while holding performance. That’s an aggressive figure, and it deserves skepticism until independent specs confirm it. But the direction is sound, and it’s the kind of optimization a large owner can fund and then hand down to the broader market.
None of this is happening in isolation. Low-carbon materials are moving from pilot to spec sheet across the industry, from Sublime Systems’ true-zero cement plant to tall-timber residential work like Ascent MKE. What Meta adds is scale and a hard deadline, since data centers get built fast and in volume.
The honest caveat: mass timber isn’t a fit for every structure, and the 70% concrete claim isn’t yet a universal result. But a hyperscaler putting timber into real buildings, on real schedules, gives the rest of the industry a working reference instead of a brochure. That’s the value here, and it’s worth watching whether the data halls actually follow the offices into timber.
Source: Lucy Potter, Construction Digital, April 16, 2026.