Just when you thought the AI data center boom couldn’t get any crazier, Meta built a data center inside a tent. This strategy seems to borrow equal parts from Tesla and xAI.
To cut construction time in half, Meta built six tents, or what the company calls “rapid deployment structures,” outside New Albany, Ohio, said Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, which tracks data center deployments.
Thomas’ discovery is not entirely new. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told the Information last year about plans to use weatherproof tents to house the company’s multi-gigawatt data centers.
But Thomas’ images and review of local permits indicate the speed of construction and the scale of the project. Mehta began construction on five 125,000-square-foot tents between April and June, according to city permits reviewed by Thomas. Satellite photos that he shared in his X post show that the structures have all been built.
The use of tents is reminiscent of the tents Tesla erected in the parking lot of its Fremont, Calif., factory when it was rushing to roll out the Model 3. The site is also powered by a nearby 200-megawatt modular gas turbine, a tactic popularized by competitor xAI.
Inside the tent will be running AI chips worth billions of dollars.
The tents are springing up as Meta struggles to expose its AI models to developers. Meta’s latest model, Muse Spark, is complete, but the API that developers rely on to access it has been repeatedly delayed, according to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal.
Meta said it intends to spend up to $145 billion on data centers and other capital investments. Wall Street didn’t like the sound of that, and Meta’s stock has fallen 5% this year. Equipping tents with AI chips is one way to reduce costs.
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
If you buy through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. This does not affect editorial independence.
