Cavco Industries posts a record $656.4 million quarter on data center bunkhouses and won't say how many

Bunkhouse single-wides, sold through middlemen

Cavco Industries (Nasdaq: CVCO), one of the largest US builders of manufactured homes, shipped a record 5,972 homes in its September quarter on record revenue of $656.4 million↗, up 17.9 percent from a year earlier, and the stock jumped 12 percent on Friday ¹²³. Chief executive Bill Boor said "data center orders and shipments increased significantly during the quarter" ³.

The product is a single-wide whose long side carries six or seven rooms, each with "their own bathroom facility, their own shower," wholesaling from the $70,000s to under $100,000 ³. Orders arrive through intermediaries, "almost like selling through a dealer," with early volume in remote Texas; most units are not built to HUD code, the federal manufactured-home construction standard, so industry shipment statistics will not count them ³.

Laramie County counts 2,500 workers against 250 staff

The demand has reached county rulebooks. Laramie County, Wyoming has begun requiring workforce accommodations for large projects on a case-by-case basis↗, among them a proposed Vantage Data Centers site, where planners count about 2,500 construction workers against 250 permanent staff ⁴.

The number nobody would give

Analysts asked for the size of the order book and got a description. Greg Palm of Craig-Hallum opened with "I am going to try to beat a dead horse"; John Lovallo of UBS asked whether the business could damage the brand ³⁵. Boor declined: "we don't intend to specifically break out the units and orders↗," and "we don't have a clear view about how much this will grow, how susceptible the orders may be to delays or cancellations" ³⁵.

The orders land in backlog: $348 million at quarter end, 8 to 10 weeks of production, up $50 million sequentially from $298 million, and 63 percent higher than last winter ¹³. The AI buildout has bought the chips, the power, the land, and now the bunkhouses.

Steel up 150 percent, a market repricing cancellations

The bull case is real: bunkhouse gross margin is "right in our wheelhouse," Boor said, plants ran at about 75 percent utilization, and the backlog lets them push production through winter ¹³. Supplier Patrick Industries estimates industry shipments rose just 2 percent↗ while Cavco grew 17.9; rival Champion Homes reports next week facing the same questions ².

The bear case has two legs. Chief financial officer Allison Aden said steel is up almost 150 percent since January and "we can't be sure" price increases keep covering it; consolidated gross margin already fell to 22.5 percent from 24.2 percent ¹³⁵.

What cancellation costs, priced in an Intel session

The second leg is the cancellation risk Boor says he cannot measure, and this week the market priced what slippage costs. Intel▼−29.36% — Intel, down 29.36 percent today fell 28.58 percent Friday, its worst day since 1974↗, after guiding fourth-quarter revenue to $15 billion to $16 billion against roughly $17 billion expected, erasing about $140 billion even as its data center revenue jumped almost 80 percent to $7.3 billion ⁷.

The January call settles it

No figure for the order book exists outside Cavco's plants. Boor promised to "share information as we can on the magnitude" ³. What settles the question is the late-January call: a number for the bunkhouse book, or another quarter without one.