President Donald Trump gave a surprise shoutout to Meta 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’s footprint, Trump noted, appeared to swallow the entire island.
“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.
While Trump referred to the project as a “big plant,” he could have been referring to Meta’s Richland Parish “Hyperion” AI data center campus which is currently rising in Louisiana and is set to open in 2030. The massive industrial undertaking comprises 2,250 acres—a 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’s 22 million square miles; raising questions about whether Trump was referring to a much larger project being built by Zuckerberg.
