It’s a desperate time for tech companies trying to assert dominance in the AI boom. Back in April, we found out that nearly half of the data centers that were supposed to open this year had been cancelled or significantly delayed — putting a bottleneck on an industry which will live or die by its ability to access AI chips.
The situation has grown so frantic that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta has even started building tent-pole data centers with portable gas turbines, Michael Thomas, founder of data center tracking company Cleanview, explained in a recent social media post.
As part of its “Prometheus” project, a gigawatt-scale data center campus in an exurb of Columbus, Ohio, Meta has erected six massive weatherproof tents to speed up 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-megawatt generator facility nearby.
Lined up in a row on a dirt construction site, the buildings look more like industrial chicken farms than traditional data centers.
The use of these canvas structures has helped Meta cut down the time it takes to deploy a barrage of AI chips from years to months, Thomas explains. The first five actual buildings at the Prometheus campus took around two to three years to build, for example, whereas the six canvas structures are already up despite beginning construction between April and June of this year.
To be fair, Meta hasn’t exactly tried to hide any of this. In a blog post from 2025, Meta wrote that “we needed to find innovative ways to scale” their AI compute.
“We accomplished this by building this cluster across several of our traditional data center buildings as well as several weatherproof tents, and adjacent co-location facilities,” the explainer reads.
The revelation has garnered some understandable comparisons to the early days of Tesla, when Elon Musk used canvas structures to house his assembly lines in a similarly desperate scramble to get 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 unthinkable that more data center developers turn to tents to plug their chips into the grid as soon as possible. These six chicken huts, in other words, could just be the beginning.
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