Just when you thought the AI data center boom couldn’t get any crazier, Meta has gone and built data centers in tents. The strategy appears to borrow in equal parts from Tesla and xAI.

In a bid to cut construction time in half, Meta has built six tents – or “rapid deployment structures” as the company describes them – outside of New Albany, Ohio, according to Michael Thomas, founder of Cleanview, which tracks data center deployments. These tents are not just for show; they house billions of dollars worth of AI chips.

The use of tents is reminiscent of those Tesla built in the parking lot of its Fremont, California factory when it was rushing to roll out the Model 3. The site is also powered by 200 megawatts of modular gas turbines nearby, a tactic popularized by competitor xAI.

Inside these tents, AI chips will continue their work while Meta struggles to release its AI models to developers. A recent report in The Wall Street Journal found that Meta’s latest model, Muse Spark, is complete, but the APIs that developers rely on to access it have been repeatedly delayed.

The tents offer a cheaper and faster way to deploy data centers, as Meta intends to spend up to $145 billion on data centers and other capital expenditures. Wall Street hasn’t liked the sound of that, with Meta’s stock trading down 5% this year. Putting AI chips in tents is one way to trim the bill.