AI data centers expand as Microsoft and chipmakers invest

Major technology companies and chipmakers are accelerating an unprecedented buildout of artificial intelligence infrastructure, funding new data centers and chip production as demand for GPUs, networking and power surges. This week Microsoft announced construction of Fairwater, a 315 acre AI data center campus in Wisconsin it says will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and deliver roughly 10 times the computing performance of today’s fastest exascale supercomputers. At the same time, the company and other U.S. firms have pledged tens of billions of dollars for AI capacity in the United Kingdom, and chipmakers including Nvidia and ASML are expanding output to meet hyperscaler orders.

Microsoft said Fairwater will include three buildings totaling 1.2 million square feet and a unified networking design intended to make the facility function as a single, enormous AI supercomputer. Microsoft and partner engineers plan to deploy Nvidia GB200 servers containing 72 GPUs per rack, with each rack operating as a single accelerator. Company statements describe massive GPU-to-GPU bandwidth and high token-throughput per rack, details that highlight the scale of the hardware demands...