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Aug 27, 2025
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Happy Wednesday! President Trump says Meta Platforms' data center in Louisiana will cost $50 billion. Anthropic settles a high-profile AI copyright lawsuit from authors. Apple's Eddie Cue is an advocate for the company making big AI acquisitions.
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President Donald Trump on Tuesday said Meta Platforms’s massive data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana will cost $50 billion. “When they said $50 billion for a plant, I said, ‘What the hell kind of plant is that?,‘” he said. “But when you look at this you understand,” he said , holding up a photo he said was given to him by CEO Mark Zuckerberg. The photo depicted a rendering of Meta’s Louisiana data center over an aerial view of Manhattan. When Meta announced the Louisiana data center in December of last year, it said it
would invest more than $10 billion into the project, which it said could scale to 2 gigawatts of power by 2030. In July, Meta said this campus had the ability to expand to 5 gigawatts of power, but did not provide a new investment number. It’s unclear which size Trump’s $50 billion price tag was referring to, but a 1 gigawatt data center for AI roughly costs roughly $10 billion. Meta won’t fund the expansion alone. Bloomberg reported that Meta reached a deal to raise nearly $30 billion, mostly debt, for the site. A spokesperson for Meta did not respond to a request for comment.
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The authors suing Anthropic for copyright violations reached a settlement with the AI company, according to a legal filing in the lawsuit Tuesday. The agreement would allow Anthropic to avoid a trial that could have exposed the company to “potentially billions of dollars in liability,” according to the company’s lawyers. Authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber and Kirk Johnson sued Anthropic last year, alleging that the AI company violated copyright laws by downloading millions of books, including their own, from online “pirate” libraries that provide free access to copyrighted books. The judge overseeing the case previously ruled that using copyrighted books to train Anthropic’s Claude models was legally protected as “fair use,” but downloading the books in the first place was not. The judge also granted class certification to the authors of the books Anthropic downloaded from Library Genesis and Pirate Library Mirror. The settlement would apply to the whole class, not just the authors who brought the original lawsuit. Earlier this month, the judge denied Anthropic’s request to delay the case while it appealed to a
higher court.
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Apple executive Eddy Cue has been the primary champion of the company doing big acquisitions and other deals, including in artificial intelligence, The Information reported. Among the deals Apple executives have discussed is a possible acquisition of Mistral AI, a Paris-based rival to OpenAI, and AI-powered search engine Perplexity. Cue, who is responsible for its services business, in the past encouraged Apple to acquire Netflix and Tesla, The Information reported. Neither deal happened. Apple has avoided big acquisitions for most of
its history. The company operates frugally and integrating external organizations into Apple’s culture has been challenging in the past. Employees of the acquired companies, especially in the field of AI, don’t stick around for long after getting paid out, because of the cultural clashes. Apple likely won’t break from this tradition of keeping its M&A strategy small any time soon, according to former executives.
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SpaceX’s tenth launch of its gargantuan Starship rocket went off without an apparent hitch on Tuesday. After launching from a SpaceX base in south Texas, the 400-foot tall rocket hurtled into space and successfully deployed a collection of dummy satellites modeled on those that support SpaceX’s Starlink wireless internet service. Before that, the booster stage of Starship separated from the rocket and, as planned, executed a “soft splashdown” in the Gulf of Mexico after conducting a brief engine test. In addition to deploying its payload in space—the first time SpaceX has managed to do so with Starship—the upper stage of the rocket achieved other milestones, successfully relighting one of its engines in space before plummeting back to Earth and flipping upright shortly before splashing down in the Indian
Ocean. It was a welcome result for a rocket that SpaceX’s CEO and founder Elon Musk hopes will eventually allow humanity to colonize Mars. Previous test launches of the rocket have experienced a variety of problems, some of which resulted in explosions of portions of Starship. In June, the upper stage of the rocket exploded on the ground in Texas, seriously damaging a SpaceX test facility.
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Apple announced it will hold an event on September 9th, where it will likely announce its iPhone 17 lineup. The most notable of the new devices is expected to be a slimmed down version of the iPhone. Apple will also likely reveal the standard base and Pro models. Apple regularly announces its latest iPhones and other hardware products at events in September. In recent years, the announcements have featured devices that have changed very little from prior models, with only minor design changes and incremental upgrades to cameras and chip power. At the same time, growth in iPhone sales has leveled off over the past several years. One exception was last quarter, when Apple reported a surprise 13% annual sales jump in iPhone due, in part, to consumer concerns about potential price increases with tariffs. A slimmer phone
could offer a big enough difference from past models to encourage a wave of upgrades among iPhone users.
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Trump Media & Technology Group, which runs the Truth Social app, said Tuesday it is teaming up with Crypto.com to launch a publicly-listed company that will buy and hold $6.4 billion of CRO tokens, the cryptocurrency issued by Crypto.com. That would make the firm the latest ‘crypto treasury’ company, whose sole purpose is to hold cryptocurrencies. The companies signed an agreement with special-purpose acquisition company Yorkville Acquisition Corp, which will become Trump Media Group CRO Strategy. They said expected funding will consist of $1 billion in the CRO tokens, $420 million in cash and warrants, and access to a $5 billion equity line of credit from an affiliate of | | | |
