Fifty-five weeks. That’s where Skanska says steel lead times have landed, more than double where they were, with prices up 25% over the past year. Mills and fabricators are both running full, and the reason is the same reason everything in this industry is currently hard: data centers and semiconductor plants.
The squeeze, in Skanska’s numbers
Tom Park, Skanska’s vice president of strategic supply chain, put it simply on a webinar last week: “Very strong demand for steel and other metals because of the AI rollout.” Add tariff pressure on top and you get clients who were never going to consider an alternative structural system suddenly asking about one.
“We’ve seen a lot of interest,” said Dean Lewis, Skanska’s director of mass timber and prefabrication. “Clients are interested in alternative materials given the supply chain strain in general across all materials.” Every figure in this account is vendor-stated, from a webinar the vendor hosted. It is not independently verified.
Lumber didn’t follow steel
The interesting divergence is that lumber escalation is sitting at 0% to 3%, Canadian softwood tariffs notwithstanding. Weak residential demand has kept lead times short, and roughly a quarter of U.S. softwood lumber consumption comes out of Canada.
François Robichaud of Forest Economic Advisors, who tracks the wood products market, said mass timber “has proven to be much more stable as of late” against the sharp increases on the steel side. Lumber is 65% to 70% of mass timber input cost by his count, and North American CLT and glulam capacity has expanded substantially over the last decade while producers still run below capacity. That last part is a projection about future demand, not a measurement.
Does the math close?
Skanska’s internal study of a three-story office project found mass timber more expensive at the frame but close to cost-neutral overall once savings on foundation, lateral system, facade, finishes and schedule were counted. Internal study, not peer-reviewed, not public. Take it as a hypothesis a contractor is willing to put its name to.
Two things are actually slowing adoption, and neither is price. Builders’ risk premiums are higher for timber than steel, and the USDA study that might change underwriters’ minds is expected to take 18 to 24 months by Skanska’s estimate. The other is coordination. Lewis said one recent project went from contract execution to timber on site in about three weeks; others took four to five months, because every penetration through CLT and glulam has to be resolved before the panels are cut. You cannot core a timber panel the way you core a slab.
The proof is getting built
The schedule case is no longer theoretical. In Columbus, a 13-story mass timber student housing building topped out ten weeks early last week at 44 CLT panels a day. A data center is a different animal, with different fire, loading and MEP density problems. But the developers asking the question are the ones with 55 weeks of steel lead time sitting on their schedules.