"What's really driving demand in our product lines is solar and renewable energy project development," said Adam Parr, director of communications and public affairs at Gerdau. "They use a lot of [structural steel] beams. Data centers are, of course, a huge market just as it's been with warehouses for distribution for Amazon and others. Those have been some of the real growth areas."

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A tour of the 50-year-old Gerdau plant provided views of the company's modern hot-rolled steel production processes using its EAF and ladle-mettalurgy furnace. A 115-ton bucket of scrap and flux was dumped into the furnace and melted by electricity, oxygen and natural gas before being ladled into production lines and cast to create structural steel products. 

Employees monitor temperature, composition and chemistry from the safety of pulpits with cameras monitoring the LMF's molten steel to assure proper temperature, form and consistency. The EAF is fired with its supply buckets 25-30 times a day to produce the flat products at Cartersville.

Gerdau's rolling mill was producing MC12 channels on the November day ENR visited—a structural steel shape with parallel, flat flanges, distinguishing them from standard C-shaped channels—capable of being run back and forth through a process known as reverse roughing to create strength and shape through several passes of the rollers. Staying ahead of the needs of customers is a constant challenge to Gerdau, whose plant is rated for 1.2 million tons a year but produces around 1 million a year as a more "realistic" figure to account for mandatory downtime for maintenance and safety.

Pivoting to Data Centers

"If you look at three years ago, what was the thing that everybody was talking about, solar energy," said Rodrigo Canova, vice president and general manager of Gerdau Cartersville. "It was lean solar. Now we are talking way more about data centers. What is going to be the construction trend in the next three years and how prepared are you going to be to react fast?"

Canova said contractor customers are reacting to market trends almost simultaneously with the plant, itself. With the various lengths of rolled steel available from the mill, Gerdau supplies more than 7,000 individual products with distinctive product codes from Cartersville with 70% of its steel transported by truck with nearby access to Interstate 74 and 30% by rail. Canova said such a diverse structural steel product mix for contractors keeps the mill competitive.

"We have 210 different [steel] sections produced here, that gives a lot of competitive advantage, because people can come and buy a bundle of this, one bundle of that, one bundle of this," Canova said. "That's what we call the single-stop shop." 

All flats and angles are stored in the 150-acre mill's warehouse with roughly 2,000 tons of finished product available for purchase onsite. A 90-MVA transformer powers the Cartersville plant with its power supplied by multiple sources from supplier Georgia Power. Canova said Gerdau Cartersville was once Georgia Power's largest customer in the state but is now behind several data center customers.

Tariff Impacts and Rising Prices

While Gerdau's executives appreciated the section 232 tariffs against foreign steel and aluminum, they said such measures, alone, are not enough to guarantee a healthy domestic steel market. While Gerdau is a Brazilian company headquartered in Buenos Aires, it has been producing steel in Cartersville since 1975.

"Even with 50% tariffs, there's still material coming in, based on the growth, and what we're seeing from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development and others, they're expecting that by 2027 there's going to be over 700 million metric tons of excess capacity on the global market," Parr said. "There are a lot of threats to the steel industry, and that's why even with 50% tariffs in place, there's material coming in."

Hot-rolled coil steel prices have increased around 30% over the last year in 2025, but Parr and Canova both pointed to the volume of steel still entering the U.S. market despite the 50% tariffs as a concern.