President Trump said Tuesday that Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta is planning to spend $50 billion on its massive new data center in Louisiana – an eye-popping figure that’s far bigger than what was previously announced.
Trump expressed shock at the size and cost of the project – which will be used to support Meta’s energy-guzzling artificial intelligence systems – during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
“I built shopping centers and for $50 million, you can build a very nice shopping center,” said Trump. “So, I never understood, when they said $50 billion for a plant, I said, ‘what the hell kind of a plant is that?’ But when you look at this, you understand why it’s $50 billion.”
The president held up a superimposed photo of the plant, dubbed the Hyperion Data Center, that covered much of Manhattan. Trump said the photo had been given to him by Zuckerberg.
Meta did not immediately return a request for comment. So far, Meta had only publicly confirmed that it would spend more than $10 billion on the data center, which will be the largest of its kind in the world.
Reuters previously reported that Meta was partnering with bond giant PIMCO and alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital to secure at least $29 billion in necessary financing for the data center, which will be built in rural Louisiana.
The data center is one of several such plants currently planned by Meta and other Big Tech firms locked in the race to develop advanced AI, according to Trump.
“A lot of them going up now,” Trump added. “Actually, Mark is building four of them and others are building similar places.”
Zuckerberg has poured billions of dollars and poached top talent from OpenAI and other AI rivals in recent weeks while building Meta’s “Superintelligence Labs,” its in-house effort to build AI systems.
Meta, OpenAI and other firms need data centers and huge numbers of powerful computer chips to account for the massive power and computational requirements needed for energy-guzzling AI models.
The billionaire, who has met with Trump several times since he took office, said in July that his company was “going to invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence.”
Last month, Zuckerberg also shared the same image that Trump held up at the Cabinet meeting. He noted that it was one of multiple AI “clusters” currently in the works.
“Meta Superintelligence Labs will have industry-leading levels of compute and by far the greatest compute per researcher,” Zuckerberg said at the time.
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