Just when you thought the AI data center boom couldn’t get any further, Meta built a data center inside a tent. This strategy appears to be borrowed in equal parts from Tesla and xAI.
To cut construction time in half, Meta built six tents (“rapid deployment structures,” as the company describes them) outside New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, which tracks data center deployments.
Thomas’ discovery is not entirely new. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke with Information last year about plans to use weatherproof tents to house the company’s multi-gigawatt data centers.
But Thomas’ images and local permit review show the pace of construction and the scale of the project. Meta began building five 125,000-square-foot tents between April and June, according to city permits reviewed by Thomas. Satellite images he shared in his post on X show that the structures have all been built.
The use of tents is reminiscent of the tents built in the parking lot of Tesla’s Fremont, California factory when it was rushing to launch the Model 3. The site will also be powered by a 200 MW modular gas turbine, a tactic popularized by rival xAI.
Inside the tent, AI chips expected to be worth billions of dollars will do the work.
The tent arose as Meta struggled to expose its AI models to developers. According to a recent report in the Wall Street Journal, Meta’s latest model, Muse Spark, is complete, but the API that developers use to access it has suffered repeated delays.
Meta said it plans to spend up to $145 billion on data centers and other capital expenditures. Wall Street didn’t like the sound of it, with Meta’s stock down 5% this year. Incorporating AI chips into tents is one way to reduce costs.
TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
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