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 $4 billion project will join a $3.3 billion data center in Mount Pleasant in the southeastern corner of the state, announced last year.
Microsoft said 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.
It said with the addition of the second large-scale data center, the site would eventually house the world’s most powerful AI supercomputer, connecting together hundreds of thousands of powerful chips from Nvidia.
The area in Racine County, which sits nestled between Milwaukee and Chicago, has drawn the attention of U.S. 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 Microsoft’s unveiling of the first data center last year, U.S. President Joe Biden, then running against Trump for a second time, highlighted Foxconn’s pullback at the site.
Microsoft said on Thursday 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.
The company plans to build solar power in a different part of Wisconsin to offset its energy use at the data centers, but Microsoft President Brad Smith said the project will entail new fossil fuel power generation near the facilities.
The driving factor was “what can be built in a particular area,” Smith said in an interview. “This is (liquefied natural gas) territory.”
He said that the 800 permanent jobs the data centers create will be fewer than the thousands of jobs required to construct them but that there will still be jobs for skilled pipefitters and electricians.
“All the things that we build need to be operated,” Smith told Reuters. “It needs to be maintained. These are good jobs.”
(Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Sam Holmes)