Meta is set to establish a data center in Gallatin, Tennessee, that will be housed in a tent-like structure.

The social media giant was granted planning permission on September 29 by the Gallatin Municipal Planning Commission to build a 135,000 sq ft (12,542 sqm) data center at its existing campus, as reported by the Nashville Business Journal.

The facility, however, will be housed in a waterproof tent, akin to those being used at another Meta data center project.

As revealed in July 2025, Meta was building multi-billion-dollar GPU clusters in tents so as to get the capacity up quicker. At the time, however, it seemed like the tents were a temporary solution, with the plan being to build more permanent facilities in the long term.

Speaking on the strategy at the time, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told The Information: “We have a very strong infrastructure team that is doing novel work to build up data centers. I wanted them to not just take four years to build these concrete buildings, so we pioneered this new method where we’re basically building these weatherproof tents and building up the networks and the GPU clusters inside them in order to build them faster.”

The tents - dubbed "rapid deployment structures" - are made of puncture-resistant and waterproof fabric supported by an aluminum substructure.

The company has also addressed the use of tents in a blog post, noting that the company's AI cluster Prometheus, which will be a 1GW campus, had caused the company to look at using tents to help it scale.

"While a region is large, it is a small fraction of a gigawatt facility. Thus, we needed to find innovative ways to scale: We accomplished this by building this cluster across several of our traditional data center buildings as well as several weatherproof tents, and adjacent colocation facilities," the blog reads.

The drawings Meta submitted for its new data center at the Gallatin site look very much like the tents already being used by the company in Columbus, Ohio.

A spokesperson for the company declined to comment to BJ on the new Gallatin facility.

Meta's Gallatin campus officially launched in November 2024. The original building at the site was set to be a 982,500 sq ft (91,300 sqm) data center and associated infrastructure on 805 acres, located south of Roundtree Drive, west of Brights Lane, and north of Hartsville Pike.

Plans to expand the campus with another building were filed back in January 2022 (and confirmed by June) that would add 627,000 square feet (58,250 sqm) of data center space and 45,000 sq ft (4,180 sqm) of office space, that is also complete.

Plans for another building were filed earlier this year, which is currently under construction.

As well as developing its own massive data center campuses, Meta is looking to expand its AI capabilities by leasing GPUs from others. This week, the company signed a $14.2 billion cloud deal with neocloud CoreWeave for access to its GPUs