Tanya Weaver Fri 19 Sep 2025
Collected at: https://eandt.theiet.org/2025/09/19/microsoft-build-worlds-most-powerful-ai-data-centre-wisconsin
Microsoft has announced a new $4bn data centre in Wisconsin that will have “10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today”.
The tech giant already has one data centre currently under construction at its Fairwater AI data centre campus in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. This $3.3bn facility will come online in early 2026.
It has now announced it is committing a further $4bn to build a second data centre at this location, which it purports will be “the world’s most powerful AI data centre”.
According to the company, this facility will house hundreds of thousands of the world’s most powerful Nvidia GB200 GPUs delivering “10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today”.
This purpose-built facility will be used to train the next generation of AI models, thus “setting the stage for breakthroughs that will shape the future”.
In 2020, Microsoft pledged to become a carbon-negative company by 2030. This is a lofty goal considering how resource-intensive AI data centres are, requiring vast amounts of energy and, in many cases, significant volumes of water for cooling.
Microsoft has said that sustainability has been central to the design of the Fairwater site, with 90% of the facility relying on a “state-of-the-art” closed-loop liquid cooling system. The remaining 10% will use outside air for cooling, switching to water only on the hottest days.
Brad Smith, vice-chair and president at Microsoft, said: “The result is a technological milestone – a data centre with enough fibre cable to circle the Earth four times, yet its annual water use is modest, requiring roughly the amount of water a typical restaurant uses annually or what an 18-hole golf course consumes weekly in peak summer.”
In addition to its Fairwater data centre in Wisconsin, Microsoft also has multiple identical data centres under construction in other locations across the US and, indeed, around the world. Just this week, it announced that it will build the UK’s largest supercomputer , with more than 23,000 advanced Nvidia GPUs, in partnership with UK-based Nscale, based in Loughton, Essex.
Scott Guthrie, executive vice-president, Cloud + AI at Microsoft, said: “These AI data centres are significant capital projects, representing tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips, and will seamlessly connect with our global Microsoft Cloud of over 400 data centres in 70 regions around the world.
“Through innovation that can enable us to link these AI data centres in a distributed network, we multiply the efficiency and compute in an exponential way to further democratise access to AI services globally.”
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