Trump announced during a cabinet meeting this week that the U.S. could see power demand triple over the coming years to meet the exploding energy demands of AI. And that Meta’s Louisiana data centre, the largest in the Western Hemisphere, will cost $50billion to build.
Trump used Meta’s AI infrastructure push as a case study in how power capacity has become the battleground in the race for AI dominance, and as an opportunity to highlight that America is leading the way.
“If you take all of the electricity that we produce right now in this country, you’d have to multiply it times two, or maybe three, for everything to operate,” Trump said.
“We’re leading China now in AI – substantially – and the reason is because we’re letting them build their own electrical facilities,” he said.
Meta announced in December that it had selected the site in Louisiana to build a $10 billion AI hub.
“We set out looking for a place where we could expand into gigawatts pretty quickly, and really get moving within that community on a large plot of land very quickly,” said Rachel Peterson, vice president of data centres for Meta.
“We looked at finding very, very large contiguous plots of land that had access to the infrastructure that we need, the energy that we needed, and could move very, very quickly for us.”
The Louisiana Meta facility, , would be among the largest single-user data centres ever constructed in the U.S. Trump used an image of the data centre site superimposed over the island of Manhattan to demonstrate the sheer scale of the project, claiming it would cover 81% of the island.
“This is something given to me by Mark Zuckerberg… when you look at this, you understand why it’s $50 billion,” Trump commented.
The US president went on to take a swipe at China and claim that the US was leading the AI race.
“We’re leading China now in AI — substantially — and the reason is because we’re letting them build their own electrical facilities,” he said.
He highlighted China’s construction of 58 coal-fired power plants as proof of how seriously competitors are addressing AI’s massive energy needs. “There’s a reason they use it — because it’s effective. It works for them,” he added. “And we call it clean coal. Even very clean coal.”
On nuclear power, Trump said it’s “very much in vogue now — safe, inexpensive, and great.”
Earlier this year, President Trump signed four executive orders aimed at overhauling the NRC’s regulatory framework. These included mandates to accelerate license reviews to within 18 months, reduce bureaucracy, and direct the Energy and Defence departments to build nuclear plants on federal land.
RELATED STORIES
Reaction: Industry backs Trump’s $8.9bn investment in Intel
