Microsoft Corp. said today it’s bringing online its first artificial intelligence “super factory” with the grand opening of its newest multibillion-dollar data center facility in Atlanta.

The company said it’s going to link the massive new server farm with existing data center infrastructure elsewhere in the country to ensure it can provide the immense computing power its customers require without energy constraints.

The announcement is a key milestone for Microsoft, which has ambitions to double its data center footprint over the next two years. The new Atlanta site is part of the company’s larger “Fairwater” network, which is a new class of server hubs that’s dedicated to training and running AI models.

Microsoft said the facility will host hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Corp.’s most powerful graphics processing units and other AI accelerators, and have dedicated high-speed links to other facilities that make up the greater Fairwater network.

The complex spans more than 1 million square feet and sits on 85 acres of land, and it’s also the company’s first data center to feature two floors, which means it can squeeze in double the amount of computing infrastructure compared to older facilities. Microsoft said the design supports a greater degree of efficiency in terms of speed and power consumption.

The facility’s energy requirements also benefit from a new liquid-cooling system that allows it to pack the thousands of individual GPUs much more tightly than before. Because it recycles virtually all of the water it uses, its consumption is equivalent to that of about 20 U.S. households, the company added.

To connect all of those GPUs, Microsoft has installed more than 120,000 miles of fiber-optic cables at the facility, allowing them to send and receive data at close to the speed of light. Microsoft Executive Vice President of Cloud and AI Scott Guthrie said this network can be likened to a “cutting-edge express lane” that’s dedicated to AI traffic.

Microsoft didn’t say how much the Atlanta data center cost to build, nor did it comment on its annual electricity consumption, but it said the broader Fairwater network will use “multigigawatts” of power. To ensure it can access enough power, Fairwater has been distributed across multiple geographic regions, the company said.

For instance, one of the other data centers is located in Wisconsin, which is roughly 700 miles from Atlanta. This means Microsoft can tap into various different power sources and avoid exhausting the available energy in one location.

One of the Atlanta facility’s biggest customers will be OpenAI, which is already heavily reliant on Microsoft for its compute infrastructure needs, but it will also cater to other AI firms, including the French startup Mistral AI and Elon Musk’s xAI Corp. In addition, Microsoft will also reserve some of the capacity for its own needs, including training its proprietary models.

The Redmond-based company recently revealed that it spent a staggering $34 billion on capital expenditures during its fiscal first quarter, with the bulk of that capital going towards its data center build out. It also said it’s planning to increase its investments in infrastructure over the remainder of the fiscal year.

It’s far from the only company doing this – in fact, a number of technology giants, including Google LLC, Oracle Corp., Meta Platforms Inc. and Amazon Web Services Inc., have similar plans. Combined, those companies are set to spend about $400 billion on AI infrastructure this year.

Photo: Microsoft