Timberland sites across Weyerhaeuser’s American estate are attracting data centre developers whose price per acre runs far above what the trees on them will yield, with the company also working to ensure the buildings those developers put up are built from wood. That is according to Devin Stockfish, president and chief executive of Weyerhaeuser, who outlined the strategy during Friday’s earnings call after the company reported second-quarter adjusted EBITDA of US$310 million.
“An extraordinary margin above timber values,” Stockfish said of the price per acre those sites command, answering Seaport Research Partners analyst Mark Weintraub on whether the company could take a share of the AI infrastructure spend. A handful of sites are already on the market, with pipelines in place, and solar development across the same land base is the near-term earner.
Getting the buildings themselves into wood is the slower half of the argument, with Stockfish naming speed rather than cost or carbon as the objection developers raise, and their own greenhouse gas commitments as the opening. The company is running that case alongside the US Lumber Coalition and other industry bodies, and WoodWorks was briefing designers on mass timber for data centre design as recently as June.
Mass timber has already become the structural choice for the sector’s largest builders, with Microsoft opening the world’s first cross-laminated timber data centres in Northern Virginia and Amazon and Meta since scaling the same hybrid system across American campuses and logistics sites. Big tech now absorbs up to 10 per cent of all mass timber sold in the United States, a trade Weyerhaeuser would supply from both ends.
Weyerhaeuser posted net earnings of $162 million for the quarter, or 23 cents per diluted share, on net sales of $1.87 billion, compared with $87 million and 12 cents in the same period last year. Excluding a $71 million after-tax gain on the Oregon land sale, earnings before special items came to $91 million, or 13 cents a share.
Adjusted EBITDA slipped from $336 million a year ago and edged past the $308 million posted three months earlier, with lumber carrying almost all of the improvement. Realisations climbed 15 per cent on the first quarter to $508 per thousand board feet, taking lumber adjusted EBITDA up $46 million to $73 million, while oriented strand board went the other way to a $6 million loss.
Higher unit manufacturing costs ate into that gain across both product lines, after the company cut output at several Southern mills to clear finished goods it could not truck out. It comes as Canfor, reporting days earlier, read the same trucking shortage as a benefit, naming constrained transportation capacity among the forces that carried its second quarter to a $116 million swing.
Land rather than timber has become the swing factor in the portfolio, with the June sale of 29,000 acres of non-core Oregon timberland for $114 million delivering the quarter’s largest special item. Timberlands contributed $123 million in adjusted EBITDA on fee harvest volumes that ran slightly higher in the West.
Strategic Land Solutions gave ground, with adjusted EBITDA down $64 million to $129 million and the contribution to earnings down $75 million to $94 million, the fall tracing to a $94 million conservation easement completed in the first quarter and not repeated. Real estate filled part of the hole, with both acres sold and the average price per acre rising on what Stockfish called high-value transactions carrying significant premiums to timber value.
Guidance for the segment moved up regardless, with Weyerhaeuser adding $25 million to reach a full-year outlook of $450 million and forecasting slightly higher Timberlands earnings in the third quarter. A second solar site came online during the quarter, with three more under construction and others expected to break ground before the end of the year.
“The return profile remains very attractive,” Davey Wold, the company’s chief financial officer, said of the $500 million TimberStrand plant under construction at Monticello, Arkansas, where labour, steel, concrete, and tariff costs are all running above budget. He put $300 million of that spend in this year, with startup due in the first half of 2027 and divestiture cash covering the outlay, including the final $22 million from the Princeton mill sold to the Gorman Group.
Canadian duties ease from here under the seventh administrative review, with Stockfish telling analysts the rate falls 10 percentage points to near 35 per cent and no meaningful extra volume expected to cross the border as a result. Commerce set that preliminary revision in April, cutting the combined rate from 45.16 per cent, while European volumes keep falling due to high freight and rising log costs at home.
