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 the time to completion 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’ discovery isn’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 2026. The satellite images he shared in...
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