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 the completion time in half, Meta built six tents — or “rapid deployment structures” as the company calls them — outside New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, Meta’s founder. cleanviewwhich tracks data center deployments.

Thomas’ discovery is not entirely new. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg I talked to the information Last year he announced 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 2026. Satellite images he shared in his post on X show all of 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. Nearby, 200 megawatts of Modular gas turbines Saving site power, a tactic widely deployed 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. Modern a report Although its latest model, Muse Spark, is complete, the APIs that developers rely on to access LLM from their applications have been repeatedly delayed, the Wall Street Journal said.

Meta said it intends to spend up to $145 billion on data centers and other capital expenditures. Wall Street didn’t like the sounds of that, 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.