Redazione RHC : 19 September 2025 17:50
Microsoft has unveiled a new generation of data centers designed specifically for artificial intelligence. The flagship facility is called Microsoft Fairwater and is located in Wisconsin. It is the company’s largest and most technologically advanced facility, which Microsoft calls its “AI factory.” This is the first of a series of similar data centers the company is building in the United States and abroad.
Fairwater occupies 315 acres in Mount Pleasant, New York. The site comprises three buildings, totaling approximately 1.2 million square feet. The complex required 46.6 miles of piling, 26.5 million pounds of steel, and 120 miles of underground cabling. Unlike traditional data centers, where servers handle independent workloads like email or web hosting, Fairwater operates like a single supercomputer, integrating hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs. According to Microsoft, this cluster is capable of delivering ten times the performance of the fastest supercomputer available today.
The architecture is based on NVIDIA GB200 servers, organized into dense clusters. Each rack unit contains 72 GPUs, connected via NVLink, ensuring high throughput and memory sharing. This design enables processing speeds of up to 865,000 tokens per second. Future centers in Norway and the United Kingdom are expected to be equipped with next-generation GB300 processors.
The building itself is constructed with a two-tier configuration: the racks are positioned as close to each other as possible, reducing network latency. Engineers envision scalability that will allow the building to function not as independent machines, but as a single global supercomputer distributed across multiple regions.
Given the high processing density, cooling is based on a closed-loop liquid cooling system. The system does not require a continuous flow of water: the liquid circulates in a loop, ensuring zero leakage. The complex is equipped with one of the largest water-cooled refrigeration units in the world.
Data storage has also undergone significant changes. Azure Blob Storage has been rearchitected to support over two million transactions per second per account, eliminating the need for manual partitioning and enabling you to work with exabyte-sized volumes.
In a post on X, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emphasized that the development of AI infrastructure requires a scale comparable to that of the energy industry: last year alone, the company commissioned over 2 gigawatts of new capacity, the equivalent of two nuclear power plants. He noted that Fairwater includes hundreds of thousands of GB200 GPUs connected by a fiber optic cable long enough to circle the Earth 4.5 times.
Special attention is Focused on sustainability: The facility is powered by renewable energy sources and is integrated into local communities. Microsoft says it is developing closed-loop energy systems that can meet real-world computing needs without compromising resources.
In addition to Wisconsin, similar centers are under construction in Norway and the United Kingdom. In the former case, nScale and Aker JV are partners, while in the latter, the project is being implemented jointly with nScale and is envisioned as the largest supercomputer in the country. In total, Microsoft is investing tens of billions of dollars and deploying hundreds of thousands of specialized chips distributed across a network of more than 400 data centers in 70 regions around the world. Fairwater, Wisconsin, should serve as a model for future implementation of this infrastructure.
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