Microsoft Launches Fairwater AI Data Center Early With Hundreds of Thousands of NVIDIA GB200 GPUs

Microsoft unveiled its Fairwater AI data center in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, in September 2025, bringing its total local investment, including a second phase, to $7.3 billion. The project is a cornerstone of Azure’s expansion of computing capacity for training frontier models and underscores the technology industry’s race for NVIDIA chips, electricity and high-density cooling systems.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella announced on April 16, 2026, that Fairwater had come online six weeks ahead of schedule. The facility links hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 GPUs based on the Blackwell architecture into a single cluster, with estimated computing performance 10 times that of the world’s fastest supercomputer at the time. Its closed-loop liquid-cooling system recirculates water, and the facility prioritizes renewable energy.