Meta $META is reportedly building tents to house some of its data centers in its latest approach to speed up its AI investment.
SemiAnalysis reported on Friday that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is constructing “multi-billion-dollar GPU clusters” in tents. The outlet said that Meta is reportedly using nearby on-site substations to power the data center tents.
In a post on Facebook on Monday, Zuckerberg said that his tech company is building “several multi-GW clusters” and acknowledged some of SemiAnalysis’s reporting from Friday: “SemiAnalysis just reported that Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online.”
However, Zuckerberg did not comment on the tents.
Quartz reached out to Meta for comment but hasn’t received a response. Business Insider said a Meta spokesperson confirmed that it's building some of its AI data centers in tents, and added that they help add more capacity while apparently stressing that the whole “supercluster” data center isn't entirely in a tent.
On Monday, the Meta CEO announced plans to bring the company’s first AI supercluster, dubbed Prometheus, online in 2026. And that’s just one piece of what he says will be a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment into the company’s AI future.
“We’re calling the first one Prometheus … We’re also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years,” Zuckerberg said in his Facebook post.
Zuckerberg claims Meta’s clusters will rank among the largest and most powerful in the world, with some stretching across an area “comparable to a significant part of Manhattan.”
The announcement comes as Meta pushes deeper into AI after a bumpy rollout of its Llama 4 models earlier this year, which failed to impress the developer crowd. In response, Zuckerberg’s revamping the company’s approach — building out massive infrastructure and hiring top-tier AI talent through Meta Superintelligence Labs, a new group launched in June.
He’s also been on an AI spending spree, including a $14 billion investment in Scale AI, and plans to keep the momentum going. “We’re going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence,” he wrote. “We have the capital from our business to do this.”
With AI shaping up to be the next big tech arms race, Meta’s building infrastructure could define the next decade of machine learning.
—Emily Price contributed to this article.