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.
Business Insider reports that a Meta spokesperson has confirmed its new tent-based-infrastructure, although stresses that the entire supercluster isn't currently housed in canvas. I would imagine these are ancillary racks hooked into a main cluster nearby, not least because cooling is a massive concern for these sorts of setups and a tent is, well, a tent.
You could pull up the sides and let the wind blow through, I guess, but I'd imagine Meta wants to be a bit more scientific than that and is offloading its less-critical hardware to the outside world while it awaits a more permanent home.
"Inspired by xAI's unprecedented time-to-market, Meta is embracing a data center design that prioritizes speed above all else," SemiAnalysis writes. "Traditional data center and real estate investors, still somewhat reeling from xAI's Memphis site and time to market, will be shocked yet again."
Posted by zuck on
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?
