In his increasingly desperate bid to keep up in the ongoing AI race, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is throwing out the rulebook in his quest to expand data center infrastructure as fast as possible.
As SemiAnalysis first reported last week, Meta is “prioritizing speed above all else” by setting up “tents” to add additional capacity to its data center campuses.
The prefabricated modules are designed from the ground up to get computing power online as fast as possible, underlining Meta’s furious scramble to build out capacity for increasingly power-hungry AI models.
“Everyone is trying to build data centers as fast as possible in the race to achieve AGI,” SemiAnalysis CEO Dylan Patel told Business Insider. “Due to constraints with power, datacenter capacity, and the construction crews, Meta has started putting datacenters in ‘tents’ to reduce construction bottlenecks.”
On Monday, Zuckerberg largely corroborated the reporting, promising in a Facebook post that “Meta is on track to be the first lab to bring a 1GW+ supercluster online.”
Meta’s unorthodox infrastructure efforts are reminiscent of billionaire Elon Musk’s EV maker Tesla setting up temporary tents to ramp up production of the company’s Model 3 sedan following many months of “production hell” back in 2023.
Could Zuckerberg be in the middle of a similar crunch time, desperately trying to convince investors — and users — of a future filled with so-called “superintelligent” AIs that justifiably eat up a monstrous amount of resources?
By all indications, Zuckerberg is trying not to get left behind by some fierce competition in the AI race. He’s been poaching AI researcher talent at competitors left and right, including OpenAI and Apple, offering up enormous compensation plans to woo top talent.
Earlier this week, the executive went on a media blitz, touting Meta’s latest data center construction projects, which are all part of a broader plan to spend “hundreds of billions of dollars” to “build superintelligence.”
But whether Meta’s latest efforts to expand its computing power with the help of temporary tents will pay off remains to be seen. For one, as SemiAnalysis points out, tents can get hot, meaning Meta may be forced to shut down racks during the “hottest summer days.”
It’s not hard to see Zuckerberg’s mad dash to stay relevant in the AI space, which is still attracting tens of billions of dollars in investment, despite worrying predictions about its profitability. As the New York Times reported last month, the CEO was quietly worried Meta was falling behind, kicking off his enormous hiring spree.
But even with top talent joining Meta, it’s an enormous bet on an unproven technology that AI critics say could soon collapse like a house of cards — or a tent in high winds.
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