Faster instantiating?

I have made a game of life clone. When loading the scene, I instantiate around 10.000 prefabs: a 100 by 100 game of life grid.
Because I’m instantiating the same prefab over and over again, I was wondering if there was a faster or less resource intensive way to do this.

(C# please)

You don’t want to use individual objects. You can use a texture with SetPixel/SetPixels, or a sprite/particle system, or if the cells have to be 3D objects, build a mesh with the Mesh class.