Microsoft unveils Fairwater, its largest AI datacenter in Wisconsin, built to power massive AI workloads with NVIDIA GPUs.
Microsoft has announced a new wave of datacenters built specifically to power artificial intelligence workloads, including what it describes as its “largest and most sophisticated AI factory yet” in Wisconsin .
The facility, named Fairwater, is the first of several identical datacenters under construction in the U.S.In addition to Wisconsin, Microsoft revealed plans for a hyperscale AI datacenter in Narvik, Norway, in partnership with nScale and Aker JV. In the U.K., it will work with nScale to build what it calls the country’s largest supercomputer.According to the company, these facilities represent “tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips” across its global network of more than 400 datacenters.The Wisconsin site spans 315 acres in Mt. Pleasant, with three buildings totaling 1.2 million square feet. Microsoft says the project required 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of steel, and 120 miles of underground cable.Unlike conventional datacenters designed for independent workloads such as email or web hosting, Fairwater has been built as “one massive AI supercomputer” powered by hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs.As per a blog post by the company, Fairwater will deliver “10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today.”High-density cluster of AI infrastructure servers in a Microsoft datacenter. Credit-MicrosoftThe claim, while bold, highlights Microsoft’s ambition to compete in the high-performance computing race that underpins AI development.Building AI’s new factoriesThe facility’s architecture uses NVIDIA GB200 servers, interconnected in large clusters to enable parallel AI training. Each rack contains 72 GPUs linked with NVLink, providing high-bandwidth communication and pooled memory across chips.Microsoft says this configuration allows the cluster to process up to 865,000 tokens per second. Future sites in Norway and the U.K. are expected to use NVIDIA’s upcoming GB300 chips.Aerial view of part of the closed loop liquid cooling system. Credit-MicrosoftMicrosoft argues its design ensures AI models can be trained at an unprecedented scale. “By co-engineering the full stack with the best from our industry partners… Microsoft has built the most powerful, tightly coupled AI supercomputer in the world,” the company claimed in its blog post.The Wisconsin datacenter also incorporates a two-story layout that reduces physical distance between racks to minimize network latency. At scale, the company says, the system behaves as a single global supercomputer rather than isolated machines.Cooling, storage, and sustainabilityGiven the enormous computing density, Fairwater uses a closed-loop liquid cooling system instead of traditional air cooling.Microsoft said the system “ensures zero water waste,” with liquid continually recirculated after an initial fill. The facility is supported by one of the world’s largest water-cooled chiller plants.On the storage side, Microsoft has reengineered Azure Blob Storage to sustain over 2 million transactions per second per account. The company said this eliminates the need for manual sharding and supports workloads at an exabyte scale.Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, underscored the project’s significance in a post on X. “If intelligence is the log of compute… it starts witha lot of compute! And that’s why we’re scaling our GPU fleet faster than anyone else,” he wrote. He added that Fairwater is “a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB2 0s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times.”If intelligence is the log of compute… it starts with a lot of compute! And that’s why we’re scaling our GPU fleet faster than anyone else.Just last year, we added over 2 gigawatts of new capacity – roughly the output of 2 nuclear power plants.And today we’re going further,… pic.twitter.com/cZJ3pdN1rX— Satya Nadella September 18, 2025Nadella also emphasized sustainability efforts, noting that the facility uses renewable energy and partners with local communities. “With Fairwater, we’re charting a new path… designing closed-loop energy systems to meet real-world computing needs,” he said.Microsoft says similar datacenters are under construction across its 70-plus global regions, with Wisconsin serving as a model for future AI infrastructure.
Azure Cloud Infrastructure Fairwater Microsoft Nvidia Gpus Satya Nadella Wisconsin
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