Microsoft has announced a new Artificial Intelligence (AI) data center in Wisconsin, USA, with plans to launch it in early 2026 and become the most powerful in the world.
This project, called Fairwater, represents a total investment of more than $7 billion (approximately €5.9 billion) and is designed to train the most advanced AI models of the next decade, with “unprecedented computing power” and performance ten times that of the world’s fastest supercomputer, as indicated in a press release.
To do this, it will feature “hundreds of thousands” of the “world’s most powerful” Nvidia GPUs, working “in continuous clusters connected by enough fiber to wrap around the planet four times.”
According to the company, each rack functions as a giant accelerator, processing up to 865,000 tokens per second. The recommunications unit, meanwhile, will use NVLink, NVSwitch, InfiniBand, and next-generation Ethernet to connect thousands of processors and minimize latency.
This new data center will be located in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, on a site spanning approximately 127 hectares and with a total built area of more than 110,000 square meters. The company assures that its construction has been planned with people and the environment in mind.
Regarding the former, they assert that the data center will bring new opportunities, jobs, and skills to local residents. Regarding the environment, they indicated that more than 90 percent of the hardware will be cooled with an advanced liquid cooling system based on closed water circuits, which will reduce resource consumption and control extreme heat.
The company expects to have completed construction and brought the AI data center online by early 2026, when it claims it will become “the world’s most powerful AI data center.”
Microsoft is also building other data centers “identical” to the Fairwater project across the United States, joining the recently announced plans to establish a new hyperscale AI data center in Narvik, Norway, and to build the UK’s largest supercomputer in Loughton.
All of these projects will connect to the more than 400 data centers located in 70 regions around the world that support Microsoft’s global cloud.
