President Donald Trump has announced that Meta will be making a huge investment in AI. He confirmed during a cabinet meeting that the tech giant is going to spend $50 billion for its data center in Louisiana, according to Bloomberg.
The president said he was initially shocked at the cost, but later came to understand it. “I built shopping centers and for $50 million, you can build a very nice shopping center,” Trump said. “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,” he added.
Trump displayed a graphic—allegedly supplied by Mark Zuckerberg—showing the proposed Hyperion data center superimposed over Manhattan to highlight its massive scale, as he announced Meta’s investment in the project.
READ: Meta sparks controversy with approval of gas power plants for data center (
A previous Reuters report revealed 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. This is just one of the many data centers set to be built by Meta and other big tech companies, according to Trump. “A lot of them going up now,” Trump said. “Actually, Mark is building four of them and others are building similar places.”
Recently, a Louisiana state regulator approved Meta’s deal with Entergy for powering the data center. Three massive power plants, slated to come online in 2028 and 2029, will generate 2.25 gigawatts of electricity to support the facility. At full capacity, the AI data center could consume up to five gigawatts as it expands.
Concerns have been raised over this by an industry-affiliated coalition. This coalition is concerned that Meta and Entergy could receive preferential treatment on the second phase of the data center project, which includes building 1.5 gigawatts of solar capacity across Louisiana. The 15-year contract between Meta and Entergy has also raised questions about costs once the contract expires. Natural gas plants typically operate for about 30 years, raising the risk that ratepayers could be left covering expenses well beyond the agreement.
Zuckerberg confirmed in July that Meta is building several massive AI compute clusters, each of them with the energy footprint of a small city. One such facility, Prometheus, will be the company’s first multi-gigawatt data center, while Hyperion is designed to scale up to five gigawatts over time. These investments are intended to support the goal of developing “superintelligent AI systems.”
Meta has also poured in billions of dollars and poached top talent from OpenAI and other companies while building its “Superintelligence Labs.” The billionaire, who had met Trump multiple times since he took office, has noted last month that his company was going to “invest hundreds of billions of dollars into compute to build superintelligence.”