Trump says Meta's Louisiana AI data center to cost $50B

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Meta’s (NASDAQ:META [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/META]) planned AI data center in Louisiana will cost $50 billion, U.S. President Donald Trump said during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

“This is something given to me by Mark Zuckerberg,” Trump said, pointing to a graphic of the planned data center superimposed over Manhattan.

“I built shopping centers, and for $50 million you can build a very nice shopping center. So I never understood when they said $50 billion for a plant. I said, they'll kind of a plant is that, but when you look at this, you understand why it's $50 billion.”

In mid-July, Meta (NASDAQ:META [https://seekingalpha.com/symbol/META]) CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed plans to build multiple large-scale data centers to deliver the computing power required to advance the company’s artificial intelligence goals.

Zuckerberg said the first project in this expansion is Prometheus, a 1-gigawatt data center campus currently under construction near Columbus, Ohio.

The largest of Meta’s planned data centers is Hyperion, a massive 5-gigawatt facility slated for construction in rural Richland Parish, Louisiana. Zuckerberg emphasized its scale with a striking visual: a graphic depicting the complex rising from Manhattan, appearing as an enormous blue superblock dwarfing much of New York City’s landscape.

Meta has enlisted U.S. investment firm PIMCO and alternative asset manager Blue Owl Capital to lead a $29 billion financing package for the project, _Reuters_ reported earlier this month. The company initially announced plans last year to invest over $10 billion in the data center.

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