Microsoft plans to match the amount of energy it consumes from fossil fuel sources with carbon-free energy it will contribute to the grid, said Smith, who spent part of his childhood in Mount Pleasant.
Cloud infrastructure providers are racing to build capacity to meet the needs of companies that want to run AI models. More than 700 million people use OpenAI's ChatGPT, which draws on Microsoft's Azure cloud, and software providers from Adobe to Salesforce have been adding AI feature enhancements to woo customers.
The first Wisconsin data center, in nearby Mount Pleasant, will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Blackwell GB200 graphics processing units that are capable of handling artificial intelligence models, Brad Smith, Microsoft's president and vice chair, said at a town hall meeting.
RACINE, Wis. — Microsoft said Thursday that it will allocate $4 billion to build a second data center in Wisconsin. The first one will come online in early 2026, with the software company spending $3.3 billion on it.
"I just want you to know we are doing everything we can, and I believe we're succeeding, in managing this issue well, so that you all don't have to pay more for electricity because of our presence," he said.
A solar farm that's under construction 150 miles northwest of the data centers will contribute 250 megawatts of power. The two put together might require more than 900 megawatts, Smith said.
The initial data center is built on land where Foxconn originally planned to built a manufacturing plant. It will use as much 2.8 million gallons of water per year, while Foxconn was permitted to consume over 7 million per day, Smith said.
"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," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in an X post.
The second data center will be a similar scale as the first and will enter operation in 2027 or after that, Smith said.
"We did pause to think through exactly what we would build for phase two, how we would build it," he said.
Wisconsin will be home to the largest number of GPUs under one roof, said the state's Democratic governor, Tony Evers.
Earlier this week, Smith told reporters that the company has allocated $15.5 billion for additional infrastructure spending in the U.K. through 2028. Separately, Amsterdam's Nebius Group said last week that Microsoft has agreed to spend up to $19.4 billion over five years to rent AI data center capacity.
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