President Donald Trump lauded Meta’s artificial intelligence data center under construction in northeast Louisiana at a cabinet meeting Tuesday — even boosting its total cost to $50 billion, or five times more than what the company says is its current price tag.

Trump held up a piece of paper, which he said was given to him by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, that showed the planned facility superimposed over the island of Manhattan — and taking up the majority of the New York City borough. While the current plan for the facility is significantly smaller, at a cost of $10 billion, Zuckerberg has said he hopes to expand it to that size. 

“When they said ‘$50 billion for a plant,’ I said, ‘what the hell kind of a plant is that?'” Trump said. “But when you look at this, you understand why it’s $50 billion.”

In July, Zuckerberg posted on his social media platform, Threads, that he planned to significantly expand the facility to rival the size of Manhattan, which would roughly double the energy consumption needed to power the site. A spokesperson for Meta did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the cost of the data center quoted by Trump. 

Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a strong supporter of the project as a boon to economic development, echoed the president’s AI enthusiasm on X. 

“Louisiana isn’t just a participant in the AI race we are leading it!” Landry wrote.

Last week, the state’s largest utility, Entergy, secured approval from regulators to build three new gas-fired electricity plants to power the large facility, currently slated to be the size of around 70 football fields, or 2,250 acres.

More than a dozen residents from across Louisiana spoke out against the controversial project, voicing concerns over the potential cost burdens for other ratepayers and the environmental impacts of bringing more polluting infrastructure to the state’s outage-prone grid. The utility maintains that the Meta project will benefit Louisianans and that a large portion of the costs will be covered by the company.