Meta builds AI data centers in tents to slash deployment time and cut billions in costs

Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents

Just when you thought the AI data center boom couldn't get any crazier, Meta has gone and built data centers in tents. The strategy appears to borrow in equal parts from Tesla and xAI. In a bid to cut the time to completion in half, Meta has built six tents -- or "rapid deployment structures" as the company describes them -- outside of New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, which tracks data center deployments. Thomas' discovery isn't totally new. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the Information last year about his plan to use weatherproof tents to house the company's multi-gigawatt data centers. But Thomas' images and review of local permits showcase the speed of construction and scale of the project. According to city permits reviewed by Thomas, Meta started building five 125,000-square-foot tents between April and June 2026. The satellite images he shared in his post on X, show the structures have all been built. The use of tents is reminiscent to those that Tesla built in the parking lot of its Fremont, California factory when it was rushing to roll out the Model 3. Nearby, 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines provide power to the site, a tactic widely deployed by competitor xAI. Inside the tents, AI chips, likely worth billions of dollars, will go about their business. The tents have sprung up as Meta has struggled to release its AI models to developers. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal said that, while its latest model, Muse Spark, is complete, the APIs that developers rely on to access LLMs from their applications has been repeatedly delayed. Meta has said it intends to spend up to $145 billion on data centers and other capital expenditures. Wall Street hasn't liked the sounds of that, with Meta's stock trading down 5% this year. Putting AI chips in tents is one way to trim the bill. TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment and will update this article if it responds.

Meta putting up tents across the US to house AI servers, like 'a scene out of the movie Mad Max' -- structures take three months to build and use jet engines for power

These "makeshift" structures are housing hardware that costs millions of dollars in total. Meta has moved from building traditional structures for its data centers to putting up tents across the U.S. and sticking AI servers inside them. Michael Thomas, founder of market intelligence and data center tracking firm Cleanview Energy, said on X that the AI tech firm has already built or is in the process of constructing three data centers that use the strategy. One site, located in New Albany, Ohio, already has five buildings that took approximately two to three years to complete. The company then started putting up five tents, with an area of around 125,000 square feet each, in the area. City permits seen by Cleanview Energy say that the construction started in April 2026, while recent satellite images show that the structures have already been completed. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg first announced the strategy of pitching tents and filling them with AI servers last year. It seems that he wanted the infrastructure to come online quickly while demand for compute is increasing exponentially. It's said that Meta is inspired by Elon Musk's feat with xAI, which built a 100,000-strong AI data center in just 19 days in 2024 -- something which usually takes four years, according to Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang. The technique is apparently quite effective, and it's now being applied to two other sites, including one in Tennessee. Putting AI servers inside tents, officially called "rapid deployment structures," is one of the more unique approaches to the AI build-out, Thomas said. They're certainly not as sturdy as physical buildings made from steel and concrete, with one commenter comparing it to the "classic $10k racing bike with a $9 lock" situation. Nevertheless, the company has probably weighed the pros and cons of such a setup and has decided that it was worth taking the risk to gain an advantage in the AI infrastructure race. Another factor that allowed Meta to bring its data centers online at a much faster pace is its use of "behind-the-meter" power, in which the company installed its own turbines to produce power on-site rather than relying on grid power. This is similar to what Musk did with his Memphis Supercluster, which he initially powered with portable power generators. However, Meta's turbines would be a permanent feature on the Ohio site, as it's designed to run independently of the power grid. Thomas said that there's about 2GW of capacity available from behind-the-meter data centers, with an extra 1GW expected to go online this year for a total of 3GW. If on-going projects stay on schedule, the Cleanview report says that the total capacity could hit 13GW by the end of 2027 -- about the same amount of power generated by 13 nuclear power plants and more than enough to power NYC. This combination of seemingly temporary structures and jet engines strapped to the ground is certainly an interesting combination. As one reporter said, "It's like a scene out of the movie Mad Max." Follow Tom's Hardware on Google News, or add us as a preferred source, to get our latest news, analysis, & reviews in your feeds.

Meta So Desperate for Compute That It's Building "Data Centers" That Are Just Tents Filled With AI Chips

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech It's a desperate time for tech companies trying to assert dominance in the AI boom. Back in April, we found out that nearly half of the data centers that were supposed to open this year had been cancelled or significantly delayed -- putting a bottleneck on an industry which will live or die by its ability to access AI chips. The situation has grown so frantic that Mark Zuckerberg's Meta has even started building tent-pole data centers with portable gas turbines, Michael Thomas, founder of data center tracking company Cleanview, explained in a recent social media post. As part of its "Prometheus" project, a gigawatt-scale data center campus in an exurb of Columbus, Ohio, Meta has erected six massive weatherproof tents to speed up the deployment of its precious AI chips. Per Thomas, each so-called "rapid deployment structure" is 125,000 square feet in size, all powered by a 200-megawatt generator facility nearby. Lined up in a row on a dirt construction site, the buildings look more like industrial chicken farms than traditional data centers. The use of these canvas structures has helped Meta cut down the time it takes to deploy a barrage of AI chips from years to months, Thomas explains. The first five actual buildings at the Prometheus campus took around two to three years to build, for example, whereas the six canvas structures are already up despite beginning construction between April and June of this year. To be fair, Meta hasn't exactly tried to hide any of this. In a blog post from 2025, Meta wrote that "we needed to find innovative ways to scale" their AI compute. "We accomplished this by building this cluster across several of our traditional data center buildings as well as several weatherproof tents, and adjacent co-location facilities," the explainer reads. The revelation has garnered some understandable comparisons to the early days of Tesla, when Elon Musk used canvas structures to house his assembly lines in a similarly desperate scramble to get a product to market. As more and more communities across the United States successfully shut down years-long data center construction projects, it's not unthinkable that more data center developers turn to tents to plug their chips into the grid as soon as possible. These six chicken huts, in other words, could just be the beginning. More on data centers: Data Centers Have Become Shockingly Unpopular, Poll Finds