{"id":256809,"date":"2026-01-21T21:39:12","date_gmt":"2026-01-21T21:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/256809\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T21:39:12","modified_gmt":"2026-01-21T21:39:12","slug":"trump-says-mark-zuckerberg-showed-him-a-manhattan-sized-ai-data-center","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/256809\/","title":{"rendered":"Trump says Mark Zuckerberg showed him a \u2018Manhattan-sized\u2019 AI data center"},"content":{"rendered":"

President Donald Trump gave a surprise shoutout to Meta<\/a> CEO Mark Zuckerberg after his address at the World Economic Forum Wednesday. At a Q&A after the address, Trump recounted a moment when Zuckerberg displayed a map of a proposed AI data center facility overlaid against Manhattan. The project\u2019s footprint, Trump noted, appeared to swallow the entire island.<\/p>\n

\u201cMark Zuckerberg showed me a plant where he put it over a map of Manhattan, and it was basically the size of Manhattan,\u201d Trump told the crowd of global elites. \u201cI said, \u2018You\u2019ve got to be kidding.\u2019 It was miles long, miles wide, and very high. It literally covered most of the island.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta\u2019s stock jumped 1.6% after Trump\u2019s statement, paring gains to 0.9% as of press time.<\/p>\n

While Trump referred to the project as a \u201cbig plant,\u201d he could have been referring to Meta\u2019s Richland Parish \u201cHyperion\u201d AI data center campus<\/a> which is currently rising in Louisiana and is set to open in 2030. The massive industrial undertaking comprises 2,250 acres\u2014a land mass equal to roughly 1,700 football fields. Once Meta completes the build, the campus will house 4 million square feet of data center space, making it one of the largest silicon clusters on Earth. However, that 4 million miles is much smaller than Manhattan\u2019s 22 million square miles; raising questions about whether Trump was referring to a much larger project being built by Zuckerberg.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Trump also marveled at the project\u2019s $50 billion price tag, contrasting the staggering investment with traditional real estate, harkening back to his past life as a developer. That $50 billion matches the projected cost of building the Hyperion data center campus.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you spend $500 million, you can build a good shopping center,\u201d Trump remarked. \u201cBut how do you spend $50 billion? When I looked at this thing, I understood why.\u201d<\/p>\n

Meta is currently transitioning from a social media company to an AI infrastructure giant, raising its capital expenditure guidance for the 2025 fiscal year to nearly $72 billion, 70% more than the previous year. Looking into 2026, Zuckerberg has warned of \u201cnotably larger\u201d spending, with market analysts projecting<\/a> that annual outlays could surpass $100 billion.<\/p>\n

The president said that AI is \u201cmassive\u201d and driving a rapid demand for energy that requires a shift in policy. Recognizing that the aging U.S. electrical grid cannot support the two-to-five gigawatts of power that these \u201ctitan clusters\u201d require, Trump ordered the government to step aside during his speech. He told the Davos audience that he has authorized AI companies to act as their own private utilities.<\/a><\/p>\n

So far it seems that under this new framework, tech giants will build their own on-site power plants using natural gas, coal or oil. Trump promised to slash the bureaucratic red tape that usually bogs down such projects, making them drag on for four or five years. Instead, he pledged to deliver federal approvals for these private energy plants in just two weeks, as long as the companies build their \u201cown electric generating plants.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cYou people are brilliant. You have a lot of money,\u201d Trump said, addressing the tech executives in the room, egging them on to start building their own plants.\u00a0<\/p>\n

This industrial blitz serves as the President\u2019s primary leverage ahead of his planned state visit to China in April. Trump has argued that American leadership in AI depends on physical infrastructure rather than just software, and said Chinese President Xi Jinping respects this rapid industrial execution.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve always had a very good relationship with President Xi,\u201d Trump said. \u201cBut we\u2019re leading the world in AI by a lot because I\u2019ve allowed these big companies to build their own electric capacity. We\u2019re creating more energy than any country anywhere in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

China and the U.S. are widely seen to be neck-and-neck in the AI race, with each country emphasizing their own strengths to best the other. The U.S. leads China in AI talent, investment and access to semiconductors, while China has the U.S. beat on AI-related infrastructure, according to a recent Morgan Stanley<\/a> report<\/a>. China is just \u201cmonths\u201d behind the U.S. in terms of model quality, Demis Hassabis, the CEO of Google<\/a> DeepMind<\/a> told<\/a> CNBC.<\/p>\n

The same day Trump was speaking in Davos, Nvidia<\/a> CEO Jensen Huang dismissed<\/a> fears of an AI bubble while discussing China\u2019s progress. The release of DeepSeek in 2023, in particular, he highlighted as a \u201cmajor breakthrough.\u201d Huang called China\u2019s advance in this regard \u201ca huge event for most of the industries, most of the companies around the world, because it\u2019s the world\u2019s first open reasoning model.\u201d Since then, he explained, many open reasoning models have emerged, enabling researchers to create something that\u2019s domain specific or specialized for their needs. In the U.S., Mark Zuckerberg has stood out for his own commitment to open-source AI models, citing DeepSeek as a model in particular<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"President Donald Trump gave a surprise shoutout to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg after his address at the World…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256810,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[220,218,219,114,8023,120986,969,61,60,2597,1226,5688,80],"class_list":{"0":"post-256809","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-china","12":"tag-data-centers","13":"tag-davos","14":"tag-donald-trump","15":"tag-ie","16":"tag-ireland","17":"tag-mark-zuckerberg","18":"tag-meta","19":"tag-semiconductors","20":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256809","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=256809"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256809\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256809"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256809"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256809"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}