Editor's take: As fears of an AI bubble grow, big tech players show no signs of slowing down. AI ventures continue to devour GPUs and dominate tech industry earnings, fueling a race to build ever-larger computing infrastructure. Microsoft is taking its biggest swing yet – constructing a next-generation data center purpose-built for AI, signaling just how high the stakes have become in the scramble to control the future of computing.
On Thursday, Microsoft announced the development of "Fairwater," a new AI data center in Wisconsin. The facility is under construction on the site where Foxconn previously failed to establish a US-based manufacturing operation and will become the company's most powerful AI data center yet. Fairwater will employ enough GPUs to deliver 10 times the computing performance of today's fastest exascale supercomputers.
The Verge notes that the Fairwater data center will be the first of a series in the US and worldwide. It will span 315 acres and include three massive buildings totaling 1.2 million square feet. Redmond's engineers designed the facility to operate as a single, enormous AI supercomputer, all connected via a unified networking infrastructure.
Fairwater will bring "hundreds of thousands" of Nvidia Blackwell GPUs online, housed in Nvidia GB200 servers that host millions of computing cores. Each GB200 rack contains 72 GPUs, a single NVLink domain delivering 1.8 terabytes of GPU-to-GPU bandwidth, and a shared memory pool of 14 terabytes. Every rack functions as a single accelerator, with a processing capability of 865,000 tokens per second.
Microsoft will use Fairwater's unprecedented computing power for both AI training and inference workloads. The Wisconsin data center will require a massive storage capacity to handle the exabytes of data these tasks demand. Its data banks stretch the equivalent of five football fields, with Azure storage reengineered to support the most demanding AI jobs.
Data centers built for AI workloads are notorious for consuming enormous amounts of electricity and water. However, Microsoft claims to have found an environmentally friendly solution for at least one of these challenges.
The Fairwater plant uses a closed-loop liquid cooling system, with 90 percent of the facility's capacity circulating water sealed in the system during construction. Microsoft said this water will be continually reused with no evaporation losses, while the remaining 10 percent of the plant relies on traditional air conditioning.
Microsoft's goal is for Fairwater to play a central role in the future of AI, even as recent reports highlight that AI solutions do not increase profits. The company's stance on AI infrastructure has shifted significantly from earlier this year, when CEO Satya Nadella warned investors about the high costs of AI development relative to its low returns.
