Microsoft on Thursday said it plans to build a second massive artificial intelligence data center in Wisconsin, bringing its spending in the state to more than $7 billion.
The new project will join a $3.3 billion data center in Mount Pleasant in the southeastern corner of the state, announced last year. Microsoft said Thursday that the initial data center remains on track to open next year and will employ about 500 people at its peak, expanding to about 800 once the second data center is complete, Reuters reported.
The area in Racine County, which sits nestled between Milwaukee and Chicago, has drawn the attention of US presidents of both political parties in recent years. It was initially the site of a proposed $10 billion factory by electronics manufacturing giant Foxconn, which builds phones for Apple and others, during the first term of President Donald Trump, but those plans were drastically scaled back. At a Microsoft event last year, President Joe Biden, then running against Trump for a second time, highlighted Foxconn's pullback and Microsoft's decision to move forward with a data center.
On Thursday, Microsoft said that the site would eventually house the world's most powerful AI supercomputer, connecting together hundreds of thousands of powerful chips from Nvidia . The company said that it plans to pre-pay for electrical infrastructure to avoid raising electricity rates in the region and that a state-of-the-art cooling system will tap into Wisconsin's cool climate and reduce the data center's yearly water use to that of an average restaurant.
"This is where the next generation of AI will be trained, setting the stage for breakthroughs that will shape the future. New discoveries in medicine, science, and other critical fields will start right here, with the models we train in Wisconsin," Microsoft President Brad Smith said in a blog post.
