Local time on Tuesday, U.S. President Trump stated that Meta's plan to build a large data center project in rural Louisiana will have a total investment of $50 billion.
Media reports indicate that Trump expressed shock at the cost of the project during a speech at Tuesday's White House cabinet meeting, noting that the project is currently under construction.
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&#34;When they say a factory will cost $50 billion, I say, 'What the hell kind of factory is that?'&#34;
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He held up a diagram, claiming it was given to him by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. This diagram superimposed the data center on a map of Manhattan to illustrate its massive scale.
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&#34;When you see this, you understand why it's worth $50 billion.&#34;
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According to media reports, Meta has named the data center &#34;Hyperion,&#34; which will have powerful computing capabilities to support digital infrastructure loads, including artificial intelligence.
Trump stated that the reason American companies can now build such large-scale data centers is that &#34;we allow them to build their own power facilities.&#34;
When Meta announced last December that it would build its largest data center in Louisiana, it mentioned an investment of over $10 billion and stated that the project could scale to a power capacity of 2,000 megawatts by 2030. In July of this year, Meta indicated that the campus could expand to 5,000 megawatts but did not provide a new investment amount. It is currently unclear what expansion scale Trump's $50 billion refers to. However, media estimates suggest that a 1,000-megawatt AI data center costs about $10 billion.
In June, Meta restructured its artificial intelligence business into &#34;Superintelligence Labs,&#34; a significant adjustment made after several executives left and its latest open-source model Llama 4 received lukewarm responses.
Last month, Zuckerberg stated that Meta would invest hundreds of billions of dollars to build multiple large AI data centers to support its &#34;superintelligence&#34; strategy, and he is also accelerating this long-pursued technology by competing for top engineers.
Earlier this month, media reported that Meta had chosen Pacific Investment Management Company (PIMCO) and Blue Owl Capital to lead $29 billion in financing for the Louisiana data center. This financing scale is far ahead of all current funding arrangements related to AI data centers

Trump: Meta will build a "$50 billion" AI data center in Louisiana