Microsoft’s first information heart in Mount Nice, Wisconsin.
Microsoft
RACINE, Wis. — Microsoft mentioned Thursday that it’s going to spend $4 billion to construct a second information heart in Wisconsin. The primary one will come on-line in early 2026, with the software program firm spending $3.3 billion on it.
The primary Wisconsin information heart will home a whole bunch of hundreds of Nvidia Blackwell GB200 chips which might be able to dealing with synthetic intelligence fashions, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice chair, mentioned at a information convention.
Cloud infrastructure suppliers are racing to construct capability to satisfy the wants of firms that wish to run AI fashions. Greater than 700 million individuals use OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which attracts on Microsoft’s Azure cloud, and software program suppliers from Adobe to Salesforce have been including AI characteristic enhancements to woo prospects.
Microsoft plans to match the quantity of power it consumes from fossil gas sources with carbon-free power it’ll contribute to the grid, Smith wrote in a weblog publish.
“We admire that power costs are rising throughout the nation and have labored arduous to make sure our information heart is not going to drive-up prices for our neighbors,” Smith wrote. “That is why we’re pre-paying for the power and electrical infrastructure that we’ll use — guaranteeing costs stay steady and defending customers from future price will increase due to our information heart.”
A photo voltaic farm that is underneath development 150 miles northwest of the info facilities will contribute 250 megawatts of energy. The 2 may require greater than 900 megawatts, Smith mentioned.
The preliminary information heart is constructed on land the place Foxconn initially deliberate to constructed a producing plant. It would use as a lot 2.8 million gallons of water per 12 months, whereas Foxconn was permitted to make use of greater than 7 million per day, Smith mentioned.
“It would ship 10x the efficiency of the world’s quickest supercomputer at this time, enabling AI coaching and inference workloads at a stage by no means earlier than seen,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in an X publish.
The second information heart might be the same scale as the primary and can enter operation in 2027 or after that, Smith mentioned.
“We did pause to suppose via precisely what we might construct for section two, how we might construct it,” he mentioned.
Earlier this week, Smith instructed reporters that the corporate has allotted $15.5 billion for extra infrastructure spending within the U.Ok. via 2028. Individually, Amsterdam’s Nebius Group mentioned final week that Microsoft has agreed to spend as much as $19.4 billion over 5 years to hire AI information heart capability.
