A company called Inventwood is starting to mass-produce "superwood"

From the article:

A material invented at the University of Maryland will soon offer a radical alternative. Called Superwood, it has a 50% greater tensile strength than steel and a strength-to-weight ratio that’s 10 times better. It’s lighter, tougher, and also locks away carbon. After seven years of development, the startup commercializing the technology will begin mass production this summer.

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The company was founded in 2016 by Dr. Liangbing Hu at the University of Maryland, after he developed the first transparent wood as a better insulating alternative to glass. “What began as pioneering academic work evolved through several breakthrough iterations,” Lau says. Hu turned his research into Superwood in 2017. The work was documented in a 2018 Nature paper that revealed a method of transforming ordinary wood into a substance rivaling titanium alloys. The discovery held the promise of a sustainable, CO2 negative construction material that was better than steel, but it was far from commercialization.

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Initially, it took weeks to make a single plank of Superwood, but Inventwood’s team streamlined the process to just a few hours, enabling bulk production of the material.

Lau tells me that the company’s first facility in Frederick, Maryland, will produce one million square feet of Superwood annually starting this summer, focusing initially on interior finishes for commercial and high-end residential projects. A second phase in fall 2025 will introduce exterior-grade panels for siding and roofing. He envisions structural beams and columns within a few years, pending certification. Their plan is to build “a larger facility that will scale to over 30 million square feet, enabling use in infrastructure and large developments,” Lau says.

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Lau didn’t disclose information about price, thought he did say Superwood’s initial pricing will be “premium” but competitive with top-notch tropical hardwoods and hybrid woods, which are composite materials that combine wood with other materials like steel or concrete. This means that, pound by pound, it will be much more expensive than steel at this point, more than 10 times in fact: $12.50 to $25 per pound for Superwood as opposed to steel’s $1 to $2 per pound.

But then you need to factor in other factors to understand its true cost. If Superwood’s offers 10x superior strength-to-weight ratio, a 10-pound beam could match the load-bearing capacity of a 100-pound steel beam, in theory effectively reducing its effective cost to $1.25 to $2.50 per pound when adjusted for performance.