President Donald Trump on Tuesday showcased a photo of what one of Mark Zuckerberg’s massive new AI data centers will look like, drawing attention to the sheer size of these facilities and how much power they’ll need.
The president whipped out a rendering of a huge data center being built by Meta in Louisiana, which Trump said was the “size of Manhattan.”
“Mark is building four of them,” he remarked. “And others are building similar places.”
The photo that Trump showed during his meeting on Tuesday was an image of Zuckerberg’s “Hyperion Data Center” superimposed over an aerial view of Manhattan.
The race to achieve AI dominance is no small endeavor. President Trump has supercharged America’s AI development through a series of strong executive orders.
On Tuesday, he told reporters that America is “leading China now on AI,” noting that this winning front was mostly due to his administration’s approach in allowing tech companies to build their own electrical facilities to power these centers.
According to Data Center Knowledge, AI data centers generate “substantial heat,” and so maintaining “efficient cooling solutions has become paramount for maintaining system stability and performance.”
To accomplish this one thing, tremendous amounts of electricity are required.
“You’d have to multiply it by two or maybe three,” Trump said of the current electrical grid in the U.S., when it comes to supporting Americans’ power consumption with new AI facilities.
In Texas, for example, a planned partnership between AI startup “CloudBurst” and gas energy company “Energy Transfer” aims at creating its own energy through natural gas, according to the Texas Tribune.
During his cabinet meeting, President Trump strongly condemned the use of wind-generated power to sustain America’s electricity needs. He also expressed a distaste for solar panels.
“Right now, Chris, whether we like it or not, fossil fuel is the thing that works,” he said, speaking to Energy Secretary Chris Wright.
In a July statement on Facebook, Zuckerberg said he would be pouring “hundreds of billions of dollars” into superintelligence development.”
“We’re actually building several multi-GW clusters,” he wrote.
The first data center will be called “Prometheus” and is expected to come “online” in 2026.
“We’re also building Hyperion, which will be able to scale up to 5GW over several years. We’re building multiple more titan clusters as well. Just one of these covers a significant part of the footprint of Manhattan,” Zuckerberg added.
