“Mark Zuckerberg showed me a plant where he put it over a map of Manhattan, and it was basically the size of Manhattan,” Trump told the crowd of global elites. “I said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ It was miles long, miles wide, and very high. It literally covered most of the island.”
Meta’s stock jumped 1.6% after Trump’s statement, paring gains to 0.9% as of press time.
Trump also marveled at the project’s $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.
“If you spend $500 million, you can build a good shopping center,” Trump remarked. “But how do you spend $50 billion? When I looked at this thing, I understood why.”
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 “own electric generating plants.”
“You people are brilliant. You have a lot of money,” Trump said, addressing the tech executives in the room, egging them on to start building their own plants.
This industrial blitz serves as the President’s 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.
“I’ve always had a very good relationship with President Xi,” Trump said. “But we’re leading the world in AI by a lot because I’ve allowed these big companies to build their own electric capacity. We’re creating more energy than any country anywhere in the world.”
