Meta Platforms is building AI data centers inside giant fabric tents to bring computing capacity online in roughly half the usual time, according to satellite imagery and city permits surfaced on June 4 by Cleanview Energy founder Michael Thomas and detailed in a June 5 Tech Times report. The unconventional approach lets the social media giant park billions of dollars of AI chips under fabric while permanent buildings catch up to the AI boom.
Five tents in under three months
At Meta's New Albany, Ohio campus, home to the gigawatt-scale Prometheus project, the company erected five tents of roughly 125,000 square feet each between April and June 2026, after the first five permanent buildings on the site took two to three years to complete. The strategy has spread to two more sites including one in Tennessee, bringing the count of tent-based data centers to three.
"Rapid deployment structures," not camping tents
Meta calls them rapid deployment structures: long rectangular buildings made of puncture-resistant, waterproof fabric over an aluminum substructure, fitted with prefabricated power and cooling modules. They skip the diesel backup generators, hardened security and full climate control of a permanent hyperscale facility, trading redundancy for a schedule that runs months instead of the 18 to 24 months of a conventional build.
400 MW of Williams gas turbines, and a Senate probe
Power is the other half of the speed bet. Thomas reported a 10-year agreement with Williams Companies to build two 200-megawatt off-grid gas plants next to the New Albany site, a roughly 400-megawatt, $1.6 billion behind-the-meter installation. In a March 2026 letter, Senate Democrats led by Sheldon Whitehouse, Martin Heinrich and Chris Van Hollen opened a probe of gas-powered AI data centers, questioning Meta directly about emissions controls and renewable alternatives at New Albany.
Inside a $145B capex bet
The tents are one thread in a giant spending program: Meta's full-year 2026 capital expenditure guidance was lifted to $125B-$145B in its first-quarter SEC filing, up from $115B-$135B, nearly double the $72B spent in 2025. The structures are intended to buy time for the permanent Prometheus campus coming online in 2026 and the larger Hyperion project in Louisiana. Meta has already acknowledged a Muse Spark developer API delay, intensifying its compute race against Alphabet's $80B AI raise, OpenAI and xAI.
Reporting based on coverage from Tech Times, Cleanview Energy, Tom's Hardware, TechCrunch and Data Centre Magazine.