# Meta Is Building AI Data Centers Inside Giant Tents to Win the Compute Race

*2026-06-07 14:01 UTC · Technology · 1 min read*

> Meta is racing to add AI compute by building data centers inside giant tents that go up in months, not years, as it lifts 2026 spending toward $145 billion.

Meta has begun erecting AI data centers inside giant fabric "rapid deployment structures" — essentially industrial tents packed with chips — to roll out computing capacity far faster than rivals OpenAI, Google and xAI. At its New Albany, Ohio campus, home to the Prometheus project, Meta put up five structures of roughly 125,000 square feet each between April and June 2026. The same tactic, borrowed from Tesla, is being used at additional sites including one in Tennessee.

The appeal is speed: a conventional data center takes 18 to 24 months to build, while a tent goes up in about three months. The trade-off is resilience. The structures skip diesel backup generators and full climate control, relying instead on prefabricated power and cooling modules and what Meta calls sophisticated workload management. One Ohio site is fed by a 400-megawatt off-grid gas-turbine installation costing about $1.6 billion.

The rush reflects the staggering sums now flowing into AI infrastructure. Meta raised its 2026 capital-spending guidance to between $125 billion and $145 billion, up from $115-135 billion and nearly double the $72 billion it spent in 2025, with each AI chip inside the tents costing around $60,000.

## Sources

- [techtimes.com](https://www.techtimes.com/articles/317862/20260605/meta-builds-ai-data-centers-tents-strategy-halves-build-time-amid-145-billion-bet.htm)
- [futurism.com](https://futurism.com/artificial-intelligence/meta-compute-ai-data-centers-tents-chips)

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TechTools News · https://techtools.cz/tools/news/article/1789-meta-is-building-ai-data-centers-inside-giant-tents-to-win-the-compute-race
Česká verze: https://techtools.cz/tools/news/clanek/1862-meta-stavi-datova-centra-pro-ai-uvnitr-obrich-stanu-aby-vyhrala-zavod-o