Do Son 
Aerial view of Microsoft’s new AI datacenter campus in Mt Pleasant, Wisconsin.
Microsoft has officially announced an additional $4 billion investment in Wisconsin to construct its second hyperscale AI data center. Combined with the $3.3 billion already committed to its first facility, currently under construction, the company’s total investment now exceeds $7 billion. CEO Satya Nadella declared that this will be “the most powerful AI data center in the world,” boasting computing capabilities ten times greater than the fastest supercomputer currently in operation.
The first hyperscale AI data center, located in Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, is slated to house hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA Blackwell GB200 GPUs. Scheduled to go online in early 2026, it will primarily support large-scale AI training and inference workloads.
The second facility will be of a comparable scale, with operations expected to begin in 2027 or later. Nadella revealed that Microsoft has internally codenamed the project “Fairwater.” Its fiber network will stretch a length equivalent to circling the Earth 4.5 times, establishing it as a cornerstone of next-generation AI infrastructure.
To address the immense cooling demands of high-density AI hardware, the Fairwater facility will employ an advanced liquid-cooling system—one of the largest of its kind globally. Featuring the world’s second-largest water-cooled chiller plant, it utilizes a closed-loop design: heated water flows through cooling fins, chilled by 172 massive fans, before cycling back into the system for reuse.
According to Microsoft, this approach will incur virtually no evaporative water loss, consuming no more annually than a single full-service restaurant.
On the energy front, Microsoft plans to construct a 250-megawatt solar power plant roughly 150 miles northwest of the site. This will supply a portion of clean energy to both facilities, reducing reliance on fossil fuels. Even so, the combined demand of the two data centers is projected to reach as high as 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.
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