Meta is expanding its AI capabilities so quickly it's housing data centers in tents, which would make them data tenters, no?

Sons of the Forest hang glider location - two red tents nearby — (Image credit: Endnight Games)

We've reported on the rapid, almost-certainly-ecologically-unsound expansion of AI data centers before, but Meta appears to have taken things to the next level. And that level is camping.

According to a SemiAnalysis report, Meta is expanding its AI hardware capabilities so rapidly, it's putting some of its AI data center hardware in tents. Erecting brick and mortar (or steel and, err, probably steel) buildings to house vast racks of AI-chomping machines is a slow process, and AI development, it appears, waits for no construction worker. So, tents it is.

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Something about this reminds me of live music production, in which a tent is often hastily erected over precious equipment because the weather forecast didn't predict rain. Anyway, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been busy boasting on Facebook (remember that?) about his grand plans for a massive data center future, including several multi-gigawatt superclusters:

"We're actually building several multi-GW clusters. We're calling the first one Prometheus and it's coming online in '26," Zuckerberg said.

"We're also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We're building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan."

Presumably these mega-hyper-super-duper centers won't rely on tent cities for large parts of their construction as well, but stranger things have happened I suppose. And as for the power and ecological concerns of building and operating such massive facilities at such an unprecedented rate? That's an argument that just keeps rolling.

Still, it appears Meta is under an in-tents phase of AI development. I'll hand in my notice now, shall I?

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Andy built his first gaming PC at the tender age of 12, when IDE cables were a thing and high resolution wasn't—and he hasn't stopped since. Now working as a hardware writer for PC Gamer, Andy spends his time jumping around the world attending product launches and trade shows, all the while reviewing every bit of PC gaming hardware he can get his hands on. You name it, if it's interesting hardware he'll write words about it, with opinions and everything.

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