Meta is using tents to build its giant AI data centers

When Mark Zuckerberg announced on July 14 that his company Meta was embarking on a project to build massively power-hungry data centers to support its ambitions for advancing artificial intelligence, the imagery that accompanied his posts on Facebook and Threads was stark. The data centers he was announcing would have power requirements upwards of five gigawatts and, to show just how big that would be, Zuckerberg’s post included a visual of a gigantic rectilinear block covering a sizable portion of Manhattan. It was as if the city were suddenly snuffed out by millions of square feet of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

A detail that was not included in Zuckerberg’s initial announcement was the curious way these massive data centers are currently being built. In an interview with the Information, Zuckerberg briefly explained that part of the way Meta is building out its multi-gigawatt data centers is by using quickly constructed hurricane-proof tents.

“We have a very strong infrastructure team that is doing novel work to build up data centers,” Zuckerberg said. “I wanted them to not just take four years to build these concrete buildings, so we pioneered this new method where we’re basically building these weatherproof tents and building up the networks and the GPU clusters inside them in order to build them faster.”

A Meta spokesperson confirmed to Fast Company that tents are currently being set up as part of at least one of the multi-gigawatt data centers the company is building, located in New Albany, Ohio. Dubbed “rapid deployment structures,” the tents are long rectangular buildings made of puncture- and water-proof fabric supported by an aluminum substructure with a mushroom-esque pitched roof.

The Ohio data center, which Meta has named Prometheus, is an already existing complex that is having additional computing capacity added through these server tents. Meta expects the facility to be big enough to draw more than one gigawatt of power by 2026. It is one of the world’s largest AI training clusters, according to the AI and semiconductor research company SemiAnalysis. The rapidly built tent structures there are part of the way Meta aims to meet its gigawatt goal next year.

Tents may be part of another multi-gigawatt data center Meta is building in Richland Parish, Louisiana. Named Hyperion, it’s anticipated to pull two gigawatts of power by 2030, with the potential to grow to five gigawatts. Meta’s spokesperson says construction has been underway in Louisiana for months. The data center being built there will encompass 11 buildings adding up to more than four million square feet. The site covers roughly three square miles, so there’s plenty of space to expand. But even at capacity, it’s far less than the 22 square miles of land that makes up Manhattan.

How much of this space will be initially made up of tents remains to be seen. But as the arms race and talent competition heat up between AI-focused companies like Meta, OpenAI, Alphabet, and Microsoft, the size of these tents may be less important than how quickly they can be constructed.

“I’m very excited about building them in an innovative way,” Zuckerberg said.