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

Just when you thought the rise of AI data centers couldn’t get any crazier, Meta started building data centers in tents. The strategy appears to borrow equally from Tesla and xAI.

In an effort to cut the time to completion in half, Meta has built six tents – or “rapid deployment structures” as the company describes them – outside New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, founder of Clean viewthat tracks data center deployments.

Thomas’s discovery is not entirely new. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke to the Information last year about its plan to use weatherproof tents to house the company’s multi-gigawatt data centers.

But Thomas’ images and review of local permits show the speed of construction and the scale of the project. According to city permits reviewed by Thomas, Meta began construction on five 125,000-square-foot tents between April and June 2026. The satellite images he shared in his post on X show that the structures have all been built.

The use of tents is reminiscent of those Tesla built in the parking lot of its factory in Fremont, California, as it rushed to roll out the Model 3. 200 megawatts were added in the area modular gas turbines supplying power to the location, a tactic widely used by competitor xAI.

AI chips, likely worth billions of dollars, will do their work in the tents.

The tents emerged as Meta has struggled to release its AI models to developers. A recent one report in the Wall Street Journal said that although the latest model, Muse Spark, has been completed, the APIs that developers rely on to access LLMs from their applications have been repeatedly delayed.

Meta has said it plans to spend up to $145 billion on data centers and other capital expenditures. Wall Street isn’t happy about that, as Meta’s stock is down 5% this year. Placing AI chips in tents is one way to keep the bill down.

TechCrunch has reached out to Meta for comment and will update this article if it responds.