Microsoft announces plans to build the world's most powerful AI data center, deploying hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs over fiber optics spanning 4.5 laps of the Earth
Microsoft has announced plans to build an AI data center called Fairwater . Fairwater is touted as the world's most powerful AI data center, and upon completion, it will be equipped with hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs, delivering 10 times the performance of existing supercomputers.
Inside the world's most powerful AI datacenter - The Official Microsoft Blog
Fairwater is an AI data center under construction in southeastern Wisconsin. It will cover 315 acres (approximately 1.28 million square meters) and will have three buildings with an area of 120,000 square feet (approximately 111,483 square meters).
The data center will house a massive cluster of hundreds of thousands of interconnected NVIDIA GB200 servers, millions of CPU cores, and exabytes of storage. Each rack will be equipped with 72 Blackwell architecture GPUs, each with access to 14TB of memory. The entire rack will function as a single AI accelerator, capable of processing 865,000 tokens per second.
According to CEO Satya Nadella, Fairwater has fiber optic cables inside it that would stretch around 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.
pic.twitter.com/cZJ3pdN1rX — Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) September 18, 2025
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,…
Fairwater uses a closed-loop liquid cooling system for its AI accelerators. This allows it to maintain high-efficiency cooling without adding additional water once the system is operational. The photo below shows some of the 172 large fans installed to cool the heated water.
In addition, there is also a data center on-site that stores data used by Fairwater.
Fairwater is expected to have 10 times the performance of the most powerful supercomputers currently available, and construction is underway to get it up and running. Microsoft also plans to build multiple AI data centers similar to Fairwater across the US.
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in Hardware, Posted by log1o_hf