In a moment that captured global attention, former President Donald Trump revealed that Meta, led by Mark Zuckerberg, intends to invest an eye-popping $50 billion in a brand-new AI data centre. The announcement came during a White House Cabinet meeting, where Trump even displayed a graphic reportedly shared by Zuckerberg depicting a colossal data centre superimposed over Manhattan's cityscape. 

Traditionally, Meta had communicated plans to spend "more than $10 billion" on the facility, making this $50 billion figure a dramatic escalation. The project, dubbed the Hyperion Data Center, is slated for rural Richland Parish, Louisiana, and is being built to support intense computational loads especially for AI workloads within Meta’s newly created Superintelligence Labs division. 

To fund this ambitious venture, Meta has tapped into heavy-hitting financial players PIMCO and Blue Owl Capital securing $29 billion in financing for the project alone. 

Understandably, the announcement has raised eyebrows across industries. A data centre of this scale is more than just a rise in infrastructure it's the backbone of Meta’s aggressive push toward artificial general intelligence (AGI). With billions allocated for hardware, compute, and AI R&D, Zuckerberg is placing a high-stakes bet on outpacing rivals in the AI arms race. While Meta has declined to comment officially, this spectacle highlights the magnitude and urgency behind the company's AI ambitions.