Cabinet meeting sees Trump shoutout to Mark Zuckerberg for gift ‘the size of Manhattan’

President Donald Trump took a moment during a lengthy Cabinet meeting to compliment Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and one of his latest projects.

“This is something given to me by Mark Zuckerberg,” Trump told his Cabinet members Tuesday as he held up a printout of the company’s new artificial intelligence data center.

“When they said $50 billion for a plant, I said, ‘What the hell kind of plant is that?’”

“When you look at this, you understand why it’s $50 billion,” he said, holding up the paper that displayed a graphic of the sprawling facility superimposed over Manhattan.

.@POTUS shows an image sent to him by Mark Zuckerberg showing the massive new data center that @Meta is building in Louisiana.

“A lot of them are going up now.” pic.twitter.com/OGPT2lIzCW

— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) August 26, 2025

“The social media company is building its largest data center in Richland Parish, which could handle intense computational power to support digital infrastructure, including artificial intelligence workloads,” Reuters reported, noting that Meta declined to comment when asked about the president’s remarks.

“It takes up a big part of Manhattan. I think they say 81 percent of Manhattan,” Trump said.

“Actually, Mark is building four of them,” he added.

“The social media giant, which is spending hundreds of billions in an effort to become a major player the artificial intelligence race, has only said publicly that its investment in the data center will exceed $10 billion,” Bloomberg reported, noting that the data center has been dubbed “Hyperion.”

“Earlier this month, Bloomberg reported that Meta had selected Pacific Investment Management Co. and Blue Owl Capital Inc. to lead $29 billion in financing for the Louisiana data center, marking the largest funding package related to a specific AI data center by a wide margin,” the outlet added.

After the 2024 election, Zuckerberg met with Trump for dinner, and the tech guru has reportedly bought a $23 million home close to the White House.

“We are making all these investments because we have conviction that superintelligence is going to improve every aspect of what we do,” Zuckerberg said last month during a Meta earnings call, according to Fortune.

“In December, construction began on Meta’s biggest-yet data center: a $10 billion complex of nine buildings, housing bank upon bank of servers that will take up over 4 million square feet, an area larger than Disneyland,” the outlet reported on the data center “supercluster” that “eventually could use the energy equivalent of 4 million homes and become the world’s biggest data center project.”

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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.

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