While it’s possible that another tech giant may someday soon dispute the claim, Microsoft (MSFT) at least for now claims that an AI datacenter it’s building in Wisconsin will be the most powerful facility in the world.
Scott Guthrie, executive v.p of Cloud + AI for Microsoft, said in a blog post last week that the tech company’s Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin is “the largest and most sophisticated AI factory” it has built, spanning 315 acres and housing three buildings with a combined 1.2 million square feet of space under the roofs.
“Unlike typical cloud datacenters, which are optimized to run many smaller, independent workloads such as hosting websites, email or business applications, this datacenter is built to work as one massive AI supercomputer using a single flat networking interconnecting hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs,” Guthrie wrote.
He notes that Microsoft also has “multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US.”
In addition to the US-based data centers it’s opening, Microsoft has also announced plans to open an AI data center in Narvick, Norway with nScale and Aker JV – in addition to a partnership with nScale to build the largest supercomputer in the UK.
Microsoft announced last week that it is actually making a $30-billion investment in AI infrastructure and ongoing operations across the UK between 2025 through 2028. This is the largest investment it’s ever made in the country.
Guthrie said that the datacenters Microsoft is opening represent “tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips” in order to connect its global Microsoft Cloud of over 400 datacenters in 70 regions across the globe.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a post on X that the company is “scaling our GPU fleet faster than anyone else,” adding 2 gigawatts of new capacity over the past year, which he said is “roughly” equivalent to the output of two nuclear power plants.
“Fairwater is a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times,” Nadella said about its new datacenter in Wisconsin. “It will deliver 10x the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.”
The Fairwater datacenter cost Microsoft $3.3 billion to build and is expected to be online in 2026, according to CNBC.
Microsoft is also spending $4 billion to open a second datacenter in Wisconsin, which will be similar in size to the first, and will be in operation in 2027, CNBC noted.
Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice chair, told Wisconsin state officials that the company will contribute the same amount of carbon-free energy to the state’s energy grid that it consumes from fossil fuel sources to power its datacenters.
Microsoft’s stock is up 22.9% for the year.
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