Microsoft’s Wisconsin Supercomputer: Inside the World’s Most Powerful AI Datacenter

In a quiet stretch of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, Microsoft has just unveiled a project that redefines the scale of artificial intelligence infrastructure. Dubbed Fairwater, the facility isn’t just another datacenter—it’s the most powerful AI supercomputer on the planet, capable of delivering ten times the performance of today’s fastest machines.

Building the Behemoth

Fairwater spans 315 acres, with three massive buildings covering 1.2 million square feet. Inside, hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 GPUs are linked together by fiber optic cable long enough to wrap around Earth four and a half times. Each rack holds 72 GPUs, creating pools of shared memory that can process an astonishing 865,000 tokens per second.

This design isn’t just about raw scale—it’s about speed. Using flat networking, every GPU can communicate with every other GPU without congestion, a necessity for training the next wave of frontier AI models.

Cooling a Supercomputer Without Draining a Lake

With such power comes heat, and Microsoft has developed one of the world’s largest closed-loop liquid cooling systems to keep Fairwater running. Unlike traditional datacenters that guzzle water, this system uses virtually none beyond its initial fill. A network of massive fans recycles and chills the liquid, reducing water use to less than what a single restaurant consumes in a year.

The company has also paired the datacenter with new renewable energy projects, including a 250-megawatt solar farm, ensuring that the surge in AI computing doesn’t overwhelm local power costs.

A Global Expansion Strategy

Wisconsin is only the beginning. Microsoft is simultaneously building a $6.2 billion renewable-powered facility in Norway and a $30 billion AI supercomputer hub in the UK. These international projects reflect the company’s ambition to dominate the infrastructure race just as AI adoption accelerates across industries—from healthcare to finance to digital advertising.

Rivalry at the Top

The Wisconsin supercomputer also underscores the fierce arms race between Microsoft and Meta. Meta is pouring up to $72 billion into its own AI clusters, including Prometheus in Ohio and Hyperion in Louisiana. Both companies are betting that the future of AI will belong to whoever controls the most powerful—and most efficient—datacenters.

Microsoft, however, holds a decisive edge in its partnership with NVIDIA, purchasing nearly half a million GPUs in 2024 alone—double Meta’s total. That buying power has positioned Azure as the first cloud provider to deploy NVIDIA’s cutting-edge Blackwell architecture at full datacenter scale.

The Bigger Picture

Fairwater isn’t a typical cloud datacenter designed for emails or websites. It is a purpose-built AI factory, optimized for training and running frontier models like those behind Copilot and ChatGPT. Its arrival signals a new phase in computing history—one where entire regions may be reshaped by the energy, infrastructure, and economic gravity of AI megaprojects.

Wisconsin, better known for dairy farms and manufacturing, is now home to the beating heart of Microsoft’s AI empire. Fairwater is more than a technological milestone—it’s a declaration that the race to power the future of intelligence has truly begun.