These are desperate times for tech companies trying to dominate the AI ​​boom. In April, we learned that nearly half of the data centers scheduled to open this year had been canceled or significantly delayed — placing a constraint on an industry that will live or die by its ability to access AI chips.
Michael Thomas, founder of data center tracking company Cleanview, recently reported that the situation has become so dire that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has even started building tent-pole data centers with portable gas turbines. social media post.
As part of its “Prometheus” project, a gigawatt-scale data center campus on the outskirts of Columbus, Ohio, Meta has erected six giant weather-resistant tents to accelerate the deployment of its precious AI chips. Per Thomas, each so-called “rapid deployment structure” is 125,000 square feet in size, all powered by a 200-MW generator facility nearby.
The buildings lined up in a row on an earthen construction site look more like industrial chicken farms than traditional data centers.
Thomas explains that the use of these canvas structures has helped Meta reduce the time it takes to deploy a barrage of AI chips from years to months. For example, the first five physical buildings on the Prometheus campus took approximately two to three years to construct, while six canvas structures have already been completed, despite construction beginning between April and June this year.
To be fair, Meta hasn’t tried to hide any of this at all. one in blog post By 2025, Meta wrote, “we need to find innovative ways to enhance their AI computation”.
“We accomplished this by building this cluster in several of our traditional data center buildings, as well as several weatherproof tents and adjacent co-location facilities,” the lecturer wrote.
This revelation has sparked some understandable comparisons to Tesla’s early days, when Elon Musk used canvas structures to house his assembly lines in a similarly desperate race to bring a product to market.
As more and more communities across the United States successfully shut down years-long data center construction projects, it’s not unimaginable that more data center developers turn to tents to plug their chips into the grid as quickly as possible. These six chicken huts, in other words, may be just the beginning.
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