Meta is building dozens of massive tents at campuses across the US, sticking billions of dollars of chips inside, and powering them with off-grid turbines.
The AI race has officially entered its Mad Max phase.
Over the last month, I reviewed hundreds of documents and satellite images for Cleanview's latest report on behind-the-meter data centers. Meta's data center strategy, which is very visible from space, was one of the weirder approaches I came across.
Mark Zuckerberg recently ditched the data center designs that Meta had perfected over the last decade and told his team to stick tens of thousands of chips in tents outside their data center in New Albany, Ohio. Each of these chips costs about $60,000. Zuckerberg plans to stick billions of dollars worth of them in the tents.
The strategy has helped cut the time to build compute in half. The first five buildings at Meta’s New Albany, Ohio data center took between two and three years to build. Meta started building five ~125,000 square foot tents between April and June of 2026, according to city permits. Satellite images show the structures have all been built.
To power those "rapid deployment structures", as they are officially named, Meta signed a 10-year deal with Williams to build a pair of 200 MW off-grid power plants. Those power plants began construction about a year ago and are nearly complete.
Meta is using the same strategy to build a data center in Tennessee, bringing the total count of tent data centers to three.
Strategies like this are part of the reason behind-the-meter data center capacity is growing so quickly.
In Cleanview's report, I found that there's currently about 2 GW of BTM capacity online today. By the end of the year, it will likely be 3 GW—equivalent to three nuclear power plants. By the end of 2027, it could be as high as 13 GW—more than the power demand of NYC.
I've been talking to a lot of reporters about this research. When I told one reporter about these tents and other companies powering their data centers with jet engines, he said, "It's like a scene out of the movie Mad Max."
Mad respect to @BillGates@Microsoft@MicrosoftTeams for hiring a cracked team of absolute psychopaths who built the single worst pile of 💩 in the history of collaboration software
Anyone doing hard things + looking to leverage AI to force-multiply your efforts … this is worth a watch, or 20.
@naval × @rauchg × @bscholl × @maxhodak_ x @nivi
https://t.co/69dNjEfc2L
big day for @ousterlidar with the launch of Rev8
2026 is the year of the component supplier, and coincidentally the year physical AI becomes a much bigger deal with better sensing and perception
Well this is big news.
San Francisco has just been appointed as the location of the 2035 World's Fair.
Four months of international pavilions, exhibition halls, new technology demos. This was just passed Today by BiE, the international org in France with over 170 countries voting, competing with Sydney, Istanbul, Marseilles and Nairobi.
They are constructing a bridge from San Francisco across the bay to where the Worlds Fair will be held, 550 acres of open runway in a decommissioned naval airbase.
You might think, how could this ever have gotten past local NIMBY-ism and California environmental law. This is where it gets interesting. The land the fair grounds are on is currently protected wildlife refuge, but federally owned.
It turns out that part 7(j) of the Endangered Species Act says the Secretary of Defense can override it if its in the interests of national security.
Right now the US is in a manufacturing and trade war with China, which currently produces a lot of critical elements of the US industrial base and defense capabilities. Batteries, electronics, actuators, sensors, IC's, all come from overseas but are critical to American military
They want to convert the area into high-technology automated manufacturing and production, integrated into the Port of Oakland and rail ties.
The World's Fair is just a pretext to bring in billions of funding through tourism and commerce. Genius move to make private industry fund the re-development of key economic sectors in the national interest.
Wild times.
Exciting to see decentralized proliferate. Will be interesting to see this take shape. Curious about noise, maintenance cycle, who foots the bill, latency
BREAKING: Nvidia and PulteGroup are partnering with startup Span to install mini data centers on the walls of new homes
Each unit packs 16 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs, 4 AMD EPYC CPUs, and 3TB of RAM - and taps unused home electrical capacity to run AI inference workloads
Anyone plowing $$$$ into hyperscaler data centers should track recursive reasoning closely. Excellent primer from @ycombinator@agupta@FrancoisChauba1
https://t.co/7jrTX9ujCu
More tornado footage out of Enid, Oklahoma, and yes it is normal for us to stand outside and watch. When you have lived with them your entire life it’s just part of spring in Oklahoma.
The other part that doesn’t make the news is how the entire state kicks into action helping our neighbors. We don’t ask if you’re Democrat or Republican we just help! It’s who we are! Oklahoma Strong 💪🏼
The White House just classified power transformers, switchgear, and substations as essential to national defense under DPA Section 303.
https://t.co/yzegM47cuL
Bacteria move around using a molecular machine called the flagellar motor that rotates faster than the flywheel of a race car engine and switches directions in an instant. After 50 yrs, scientists have finally figured out how it works. “My lifelong quest is now fulfilled.” Link⤵️