Meta has erected six massive weatherproof tents filled with AI chips at its gigawatt-scale “Prometheus” campus outside Columbus, Ohio, to speed up compute deployment, according to Cleanview founder Michael Thomas. Each 125,000-square-foot “rapid deployment structure” runs off a nearby 200-megawatt gas generator facility, and the canvas approach cut deployment time from years to months: the campus's first five conventional buildings took two to three years, while the six tents went up in roughly two.
Meta hasn't hidden the move, writing in a 2025 blog post that it needed innovative ways to scale and built the cluster across traditional buildings, weatherproof tents, and co-location sites. The setup drew comparisons to Tesla's early canvas-tent assembly lines, and lands as data-center projects face mounting local opposition across the U.S
