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 construction time 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’ findings aren’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. The satellite images he shared in his post on X show the structures have all been built.

The use of tents is reminiscent of those Tesla built in the parking lot of its Fremont, California factory 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, likely worth billions of dollars, will go about their business.

Meta is building dozens of massive tents at campuses across the US, sticking billions of dollars of chips inside, and powering them with off-grid turbines. The AI race has officially entered its Mad Max phase.Over the last month, I reviewed hundreds of documents and satellite… pic.twitter.com/U8yDZUlEO0

The tents have sprung up as Meta has struggled to release its AI models to developers. A recent report in The Wall Street Journal found that Meta’s latest model, Muse Spark, is complete, but the APIs that developers rely on to access it have 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 sound of that, with Meta’s stock trading down 5% this year. Putting AI chips in tents is one way to trim the bill.

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Tim De Chant is a senior climate reporter at TechCrunch. He has written for a wide range of publications, including Wired magazine, the Chicago Tribune, Ars Technica, The Wire China, and NOVA Next, where he was founding editor.

De Chant is also a lecturer in MIT’s Graduate Program in Science Writing, and he was awarded a Knight Science