With Meta building ‘tented’ data centers, Zuckerberg reveals plans for gigawatt-scale clusters

Meta is accelerating its investment in the infrastructure that it believes will power the future of artificial intelligence training and inference, with a number of high-capacity, fast-deployment data centers. Towards this end, Meta is also building "tented" data centers, rather than traditionally roofed structures.

It has been reported that Meta will be the first company to build out and deploy a gigawatt-scale datacenter for AI – Hyperion, which will give the company over three billion TFLOPS of compute power. The Meta CEO, Mark Zuckerberg also announced plans to bring the company’s first AI supercluster, dubbed Prometheus, online in 2026. And that’s just one piece of what he says will be a multi-year, multi-billion-dollar investment into the company’s AI future.

While the company has been poaching AI researchers, Meta is so eager to boost its computing power that it’s literally erecting tents for temporary data center capacity while its facilities are still under construction.

These are all signs that Meta wants to build up its AI capacity faster after falling behind competitors like OpenAI, xAI, and Google and that Zuckerberg isn’t willing to wait for typical construction timelines to close the gap.

As for its Hyperion data center, a Meta spokesperson said that it will be located in Louisiana and will likely have a capacity of 2 gigawatts by 2030.