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

Key points

• 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.