Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has taken a wildly unconventional path to powering its AI ambitions. 

It’s building data centers inside massive weatherproof tents. Yes, tents. Six of them have already gone up outside New Albany, Ohio. 

Ohio

Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, a firm that tracks data center activity, spotted the structures through satellite imagery and local building permits.

What he found tells quite a story.

Meta started construction on five tents between April and June of this year. Each one stretches 125,000 square feet. That’s bigger than two football fields. 

And according to Thomas’ satellite images, they’re already built. Meta calls these structures “rapid deployment structures.” Everyone else is calling them tents.

Inside each one are AI chips worth billions of dollars, quietly crunching away.

Also read: Meta Quietly Pulls the Plug on Its Metaverse Dream

Tesla

Tesla used a similar trick back when it was in a hurry to roll out the Model 3. 

The electric carmaker threw up temporary structures in the parking lot of its Fremont, California factory just to keep production moving. 

Meta is doing the same. CEO Mark Zuckerberg actually previewed this approach last year in a conversation with The Information. 

He laid out plans to use weatherproof tents to house the company’s multi-gigawatt data centers. At the time, it sounded ambitious. Now it’s happening.

Gas Turbines 

The Ohio site draws power from 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines nearby. That’s another borrowed idea, this time from xAI, Elon Musk’s AI company, which made this approach popular.

Modular gas turbines spin up fast. They don’t require the same long lead times as power grid connections. When you’re trying to build an AI empire at breakneck speed, that matters.

Urgency 

The Wall Street Journal recently reported that Meta’s latest AI model, called Muse Spark, is finished. 

The model itself is ready to go. But the APIs developers need to actually use it have been delayed over and over. 

Developers are waiting, and the pressure is getting intense. Tents cut construction time in half compared to regular data centers. 

Data Centers 

Meta has committed to spending up to $145 billion on data centers and capital expenditures. That’s not what Wall Street wants.

Meta’s stock is down about 5% this year, and investors are nervous about the tab.

Building in tents helps trim costs and also speeds up the timeline. For Meta, right now, both of those things matter enormously.