Meta has begun piloting the use of mass timber in the construction of its data center campuses.

The tech giant began the pilot earlier this year, aiming to replace the use of steel and other building materials with wood-based products engineered for strength and durability.

According to Meta, the products are engineered for use in industrial applications, such as data centers, and include products like glue-laminated, wooden beams and columns (glulam), mass plywood, and timber wall assemblies.

Meta erected its first administrative building made from mass timber at its Aiken, South Carolina, data center campus this year in partnership with DPR and SmartLam.

It plans to begin construction on further mass timber buildings later this year at its Cheyenne, Wyoming, site with Fortis Construction and Mercer Mass Timber, and its Montgomery, Alabama, site with Hensel Phelps and Binderholz.

Meta aims to embed the use of mass timber across its data center portfolio and has said it will “begin incorporating mass timber into additional administrative buildings, warehouses, and even the critical data halls.”

The use of mass timber can have a significant impact on reducing the carbon intensity of data center construction. According to Meta, the incorporation of mass timber in these buildings will reduce the embodied carbon of the materials being substituted by around 41 percent. In addition, since most mass timber products are pre-fabricated, the need to weld steel onsite falls significantly, reducing the construction time by several weeks.

Concerns over fire risk are alleviated through the use of a char layer, which makes it reliably fire-resistant. In order to ensure the sustainability of the materials, Meta requires third-party audits to ensure wood is sourced and milled responsibly. The audits ensure that the wood can be traced to the forest of origin to support conservation efforts.

The company has said this goes hand in hand with its sustainable forest efforts. For example, last year, the company signed a reforestation-based carbon removal deal with BTG Pactual Timberland Investment Group for 1.3 million tons of credits generated from a project in Latin America.

Meta is not the first data center developer to pioneer the use of mass timber in its construction process. In October, Microsoft announced it was constructing two data centers in Northern Virginia, partially using cross-laminated timber (CLT). The company said that the build would reduce the data centers' embodied carbon footprint by around 35 percent. DCD first reported on Microsoft's timber plans in August.

EcoDataCenter, a Swedish developer, also used mass timber to construct the skeleton of its Falun campus.

Also, earlier this year, German data center firm Prior1 announced the launch of a prefabricated timber data center module, with enough room to host five racks, a 14kW propane-based indirect free cooling system, and a 15kVA UPS module.
 
Source: datacenterdynamics.com