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Microsoft has announced a new $4 billion investment in Wisconsin for a second hyperscale AI data center. This adds to the $3.3 billion already committed to its first facility, bringing the total investment to over $7 billion. CEO Satya Nadella stated this center will be “the most powerful AI data center in the world,” with computing capabilities ten times greater than the fastest existing supercomputer.
The first hyperscale AI data center in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, will feature hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 GPUs. It is set to launch in early 2026 and will focus on large-scale AI training and inference.
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The second facility will be similar in size and is set to begin operations in 2027 or later. Nadella mentioned that Microsoft has internally named the project “Fairwater.” Its fiber network will be long enough to circle the Earth 4.5 times, making it vital for next-gen AI infrastructure.
The Fairwater facility will implement a large liquid-cooling system to meet the cooling needs of high-density AI hardware. It has the world’s second-largest water-cooled chiller plant, using a closed-loop design where heated water cools down with the help of 172 large fans before being reused.
According to Microsoft, this approach will incur virtually no evaporative water loss, consuming no more annually than a single full-service restaurant.
Microsoft is building a 250-megawatt solar power plant 150 miles northwest to provide clean energy for its facilities, decreasing fossil fuel use. However, the two data centers’ total energy demand is expected to reach 900 megawatts.
While Microsoft is positioning Fairwater as “the world’s most powerful” data center, the title may be short-lived. OpenAI, Oracle, and SoftBank are collaborating on the “Stargate” project, which envisions AI data centers consuming electricity at the gigawatt scale. Cloud provider Vantage also announced in late August a $25 billion investment in Texas to build a 1.4-gigawatt AI data center, while Google disclosed plans in July to establish a 1-gigawatt facility in Andhra Pradesh, India.
