Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents (techcrunch.com)

This is madness. The polling is in and the public hates, positively hates AI. So of course the response is to do AI even more. https://newrepublic.com/article/209163/ai-industry-discoveri...

Technology is getting too in tents for me. /former boy scout

A desperate bid to get around data center bans: disguise them as homeless encampments

"All this inference will be lost in time, like GPUs in rain."

Meta's first five buildings took between two and three years to build, but Williams is almost done building out 200 MW (additional) off-grid power plants in a year, and to match that they're putting their equipment in tents. That raises questions for me:

* Did they expect the next five buildings to also take between two and three years to build if done in the same manner? I'd hope it'd be significantly faster the second time because they've perfected the design, found good local contractors and suppliers, etc.

* How much of the time was the actual structure vs. all the stuff inside they still have to do with the tents?

* How long are they expecting to keep this? Are they anticipating extra problems like leaking roofs?

* What are the "off-grid power plants"? Is this basically a whole bunch of diesel or natural gas generators? [edit: oh, yes, "The site is also powered by 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines". I wonder if they're trucking in the fuel too.] If so, yuck.

Just waiting for the first heist

When I read the headline I imagined a huge tent with steel beam structure and professional grade covers with HVAC and concrete footprint.

Seems everyone else imagined a camping tent. Different backgrounds I guess.

The fact that these behemoths are being powered by gas generators is horrifying

As always, there are some very erudite comments here on HN, which is why I like the site so much. My erudite comment, or rather question, is this: why aren't these people using AI to solve all these problems? Surely it would be a good test of The Product and maybe it would give s[ck]eptics some food for thought?

Extreme competition

and

Safety

Are opposites.

The whole thing is like a video game: your construction and power are your limiting factors. We need to CONSTRUCT ADDITIONAL PYLONS and so on. It's interesting that this is such a limiter on the ground that SpaceX is pursuing AI satellites in space. Truly an incredible time to be alive.

Microsoft had trialed datacenters in tents nearly 20 years ago. I remember hearing about their trials at some talks back in the day. Crazy to look back on the dates here, felt like it wasn't that long ago.

https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/hyperscalers/new-from-mi...

So AI infrastructure buildout is starting to feel a lot like emergency industrial mobilization...

Also, building rapid temp shells plus nearby gas turbines paints a very different picture than the one conveyed by the "clean-energy" PR around hyperscale data centers.

These datacenters have been under construction since at least June of 2025. You can see 1 building was already up in 2025 and the land was just farmland back in 9/13/2024. So this construction has been over 1 year in the making. Does this mean its construction slop? For reference colossus xAI datacenter was up and running in less than 7 months. I couldn't tell you at what capacity but this doesn't seem like quite the same story.

Edit For a little more context xAI colossus 2 looks to be an empty warehouse on 3/10/2025. By 12/2025 they had already either filled the warehouse or they couldn't use the space because they appear to built multiple structures outside for the datacenter.

For comparison again meta already had that datacenter there for a number of years and then over 2 years added those structures. In 9 months it appears Tesla built a datacenter into an existing building and added structures.

>Inside the tents, AI chips, likely worth billions of dollars, will go about their business.

I wonder how the security is. It's just a matter of time until organized crime will start paying attention to this. Perhaps a bet for polymarket?

Any data on how these tents cope in a storm?

Off topic. The internet is so broken when someone still posts to X.com and then a news outlet posts that as an article. Maybe if it wasn’t X.com being used it wouldn’t be so bad. Seems like we can do better.