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."
I don’t think any of you understand what is about to happen in the market. We are about to live through the craziest five year run in technocapital history. God help us all. I pray that when Judgement comes He can see all that we did to ensure efficient price discovery.
Top 3 companies to support for Pride Month
OpenAI - Gay Founder (Sam Altman)
Palantir - Gay CoFounder (Peter Thiel)
Anthropic - Arguably the last woke company in Silicon Valley
Companies to avoid
Apple for firing their gay ceo just months before pride month
The NYT is predictably tearing down Reese Witherspoon for encouraging moms to try AI before they ingest the anti-AI pablum as truth
Instead of linking to the NYT op-ed, I think you should watch this video and encourage you to follow Reese Witherspoon on Instagram
@austinmcraig Same here. Aside from the acre-feet allotted to the land, I haven’t seen any public figures on anticipated consumption.
What numbers are you drawing from to conclude it’s comparable to a business office? Genuinely curious.
Mormons are really smart in how they do things.
They invented a "draft" that forces travel, socialization, leaving home, and development of openness at the critical moment of life.