Microsoft touts mega-datacenter on old Foxconn site • The Register
Microsoft’s CEO has claimed the operating system-slinger is building the “world’s largest datacenter.”
In an X post on Thursday, Satya Nadella said that the datacenter Microsoft has built at Fairwater, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, would be ten times faster than the world’s largest supercomputer, have “hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200s,” and enough fiber connections to encircle the world 4.5 times. That’s about 35,550 miles (57,600 kilometers), based on the Earth’s equatorial diameter.
Mount Pleasant has had a checkered history with the tech industry. Once touted as a new innovation hyub, it has suffered multiple corporate letdowns from many national leaders, but on Wednesday Microsoft’s president Brad Smith said it was time to bring investment back to his home by building datacenters.
“As someone who spent almost five years as a kid going to school and delivering the morning newspaper by bicycle in Mount Pleasant, this moment means more than just personal nostalgia,” Smith said in a blog post. “It shows that Wisconsin has not just a longstanding and proud industrial past – it’s helping define the future of American innovation.”
Well, in a way. Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn planned to use much of the original Mount Pleasant plant as a high-tech campus, then an LCD production facility. In 2017 President Trump predicted it would be the “eighth wonder of the world” and the state’s Republican governor Scott Walker coughed up $3 billion in subsidies to get the project started. Foxconn initially promised 30,000 jobs, then reduced that number to 13,000, and ultimately delivered just 281.
Foxconn abandoned the project and Microsoft took over much of the land to build a $3.3 billion AI bit barn on the site. But Microsoft paused its expansion plans in January while Redmond said it would “evaluate scope and recent changes in technology.” This led to Badger State locals wondering if they were going to get hosed again, but it appears Microsoft is going to make it happen.
Smith said Microsoft has more than doubled down on its original plans for the site, by building a $4 billion second datacenter packed with Nvidia GPUs. Microsoft says around 3,000 workers could be employed to build the data processing buildings, which could need 800 full-time workers to keep them humming. Local residents may also benefit from better broadband thanks to the network infrastructure built to serve the sites.
As for concerns that datacenters at this scale might strain local power and water resources, Smith assured residents that all will be well. Over 90 percent of the space will be chilled out by closed-loop liquid cooling, which massively cuts water needs to the equivalent of the yearly use of an American restaurant, Smith claimed.
Microsoft says new datacenter is pretty chill – Click to enlarge
“Fairwater is supported by the second largest water-cooled chiller plant on the planet and will continuously circulate water in its closed loop cooling system,” blogged Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s exec veep for Cloud and AI. “The hot water is then piped out to the cooling ‘fins’ on each side of the datacenter, where 172 20-foot fans chill and recirculate the water back.”
Such cooling systems consume a lot of energy. Not a problem, says Smith: Microsoft is currently building a 250 MW solar farm so that it can match every kilowatt hour it uses from fossil fuels with a matching quantity of renewable energy.
Environmental groups are less impressed. According to campaigners at Clean Wisconsin, the Microsoft campus and the nearby Vantage datacenter in Port Washington will, in combination, consume enough energy to power 4.33 million homes, rather more than the state’s 2.8 million dwellings. ®
