Microsoft officiallyAnnounceMicrosoft is investing an additional $40 billion in Wisconsin to build its second super-large AI data center. Together with the first, currently under construction and with an investment of approximately $33 billion, this brings the total investment to over $70 billion. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has stated that this will be "the world's most powerful AI data center," boasting 10 times the computing power of the world's fastest supercomputer.
Microsoft's first large-scale AI data center is located in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina. It is expected to deploy hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 GPUs and will be put into operation in early 2026, mainly used to support large-scale AI training and inference.
The second large-scale AI data center will be similar in size to the first and is scheduled to open in 2027 or later. Satya Nadella noted that this project, known internally at Microsoft as "Fairwater," will have enough fiber optic cable to circle the Earth 4.5 times and will become the core infrastructure for the next generation of AI technology.
This data center utilizes an advanced liquid cooling system to address the inability of traditional air cooling to meet the heat dissipation requirements of high-density AI hardware. "Fairwater" will house the world's second-largest water-cooled chiller, employing a closed-loop water circulation design. Hot water is piped to cooling fins, where it is cooled by 172 massive fans and then returned to the system for reuse.
Microsoft noted that the system causes almost no water loss due to evaporation during operation, and its annual water consumption is only the same as that of a year-round restaurant.
Regarding energy use, Microsoft plans to build a 250-megawatt solar power plant approximately 150 miles northwest of the data center to provide some clean energy for the two data centers, reducing carbon emissions from fossil fuel power generation. According to Microsoft's estimates, the two data centers may require a total of up to 900 megawatts of electricity to operate.
Although Microsoft positions Fairwater as the "world's most powerful," this title may soon be challenged. The Stargate project, a collaboration between OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank, has already planned to build an AI data center with gigawatt-scale power consumption. Cloud service provider Vantage also announced at the end of August that it would invest $25 billion to build a 1.4-gigawatt AI data center in Texas. Google announced in July that it would build a 1-gigawatt data center facility in Andhra Pradesh, India.
