Fast Company reports:

When Mark Zuckerberg announced on July 14 that his company Meta was embarking on a project to build massively power-hungry data centers to support its ambitions for advancing artificial intelligence, the imagery that accompanied his posts on Facebook and Threads was stark. The data centers he was announcing would have power requirements upwards of five gigawatts and, to show just how big that would be, Zuckerberg’s post included a visual of a gigantic rectilinear block covering a sizable portion of Manhattan. It was as if the city were suddenly snuffed out by millions of square feet of artificial intelligence infrastructure.

A detail that was not included in Zuckerberg’s initial announcement was the curious way these massive data centers are currently being built. In an interview with the Information, Zuckerberg briefly explained that part of the way Meta is building out its multi-gigawatt data centers is by using quickly constructed hurricane-proof tents.

“We have a very strong infrastructure team that is doing novel work to build up data centers,” Zuckerberg said. “I wanted them to not just take four years to build these concrete buildings, so we pioneered this new method where we’re basically building these weatherproof tents and building up the networks and the GPU clusters inside them in order to build them faster.” [Continue reading…]

Data Center Dynamics notes:

Tents are not typically an ideal structure for data centers, as the hardware deployed is extremely expensive and generates a lot of heat. SemiAnalysis noted that Meta may have to shut down workloads during the hotter days in summer.