Microsoft’s first data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.
Microsoft
Racine, Wisconsin – Microsoft On Thursday, he said $4 billion would be allocated to build a second data center in Wisconsin. The first one went online in early 2026, with the software company spending $3.3 billion.
The first Wisconsin data center in nearby Mount Pleasant will house hundreds of thousands of people nvidia The Blackwell GB200 Graphic Processing Unit, which can handle artificial intelligence models, said Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president and vice-chairman.
Cloud infrastructure providers are competing to build their capabilities to meet the needs of businesses that want to implement AI models. Over 700 million people use Openai’s ChatGpt, which uses Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, and the software provider is Adobe In Salesforce We have added AI extensions to our customers.
Microsoft plans to match the amount of energy consumed from fossil fuel sources with the carbon-free energy that contributes to the grid, said Smith, who spent part of his childhood at Mount Pleasant.
“I think we are successfully managing this issue simply because we want them to know that we are doing everything we can.
The solar farm under construction 150 miles northwest of the data center will contribute 250 megawatts of electricity. Smith said two megawatts could be needed.
The first data center is being built on the land that Foxconn originally planned to build a manufacturing plant. Smith said Foxconn was allowed to consume more than 7 million water per day, but would use 2.8 million gallons of water per year.
“This delivers 10x the performance of today’s world’s fastest supercomputers, enabling AI training and inference workloads at levels never seen before,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote in an X post.
The second data center is on a similar scale to the first data center, and will conclude operations in 2027 or after, Smith said.
“We paused to think about exactly what we’re going to build for Phase 2 and how we’re going to build it,” he said.
Wisconsin will be home to the largest number of GPUs under one roof, state Democratic Gov. Tony Evers said.
Earlier this week, Smith told reporters that the company had allocated $15.5 billion to additional infrastructure spending in the UK by 2028. Nebius Group Last week, Microsoft said it had agreed to spend up to $19.4 billion over five years to borrow capacity in AI data centers.
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