Meta steals tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents

Just when you thought the AI ​​data center boom couldn’t get any crazier, Meta built data centers in tents. The strategy appears to borrow in equal parts from Tesla and xAI.

In an effort to cut construction time in half, Meta built six tents — or “rapid deployment structures” as the company calls them — outside New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, founder of CleanView, which tracks data center deployments.

Thomas’s findings are not entirely 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’s photos and review of local permits illustrate the speed of construction and the scale of the project. According to city permits reviewed by Thomas, Meta began construction of five 125,000-square-foot tents between April and June. The satellite images he shared in his post on X show that all the structures have been built.

The use of tents is reminiscent of the ones Tesla built in the parking lot of its factory in Fremont, California, when it was rushing to roll out the Model 3. The site is also powered by 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines nearby, a tactic popularized by competitor xAI.

Inside the tents, AI chips, potentially worth billions of dollars, will do their work.

The tents emerged as Meta struggled to release its AI models to developers. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal found that the latest Meta model, Muse Spark, has been completed, but the APIs that developers rely on to access it have been repeatedly delayed.

Meta said it intends to spend up to $145 billion on data centers and other capital expenditures. Wall Street didn’t like this, with Meta shares trading down 5% this year. Placing AI chips in tents is one way to lower the bill.

TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment and will update this article if it responds.