TECH NEWS – That means hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Blackwell-based GPUs are now being put to work under the Redmond giant’s control.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella confirmed on Twitter that the company’s Fairwater AI data center is going live earlier than planned. That is significant news, because the Wisconsin facility is set to become the world’s most powerful artificial intelligence data center. The site was first announced in September, and it will rely on hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 GPUs built on the Blackwell architecture. Those accelerators will be tied together into a single seamless cluster designed to handle the enormous performance demands of agentic AI workloads.
The scale of the facility is staggering. It will not only house an immense number of Blackwell GPUs, but also includes a fiber-optic network long enough to circle the Earth 4.5 times. When the data center was originally announced, the stated ambition was to deliver ten times the performance of the fastest supercomputers available at that point. The AI system will be fully liquid-cooled through a closed-loop setup, meaning no additional water will be needed once the build is complete. Microsoft had already expanded its AI-related capacity by 2 gigawatts previously, which is roughly equivalent to operating two nuclear power plants. For Fairwater, the company says that energy demand will be covered using renewable sources.
Looking further ahead, Microsoft has already identified more than 70 regions across the United States where it intends to build Fairwater-like facilities. These will join the 100 data centers the company already has in operation. Building Fairwater and similar sites, however, places a tremendous burden on the environment, the power sector, and an already strained supply chain. Microsoft says it will make sure the facility does not push up local energy prices, and that it will prepay for the electricity it uses as well as the underlying electrical infrastructure. That has already led to the construction of a new 250 MW solar plant in Portage County, and the company also says it will ensure full ecological protection for the surrounding area.
Data centers require enormous amounts of RAM and GPU hardware, which is one of the reasons those components have become so much more expensive. SSDs are getting uglier too, and even CPUs are slowly drifting toward unaffordable territory.
Our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin is going live, ahead of schedule.
As the world’s most powerful AI datacenter, it will bring together hundreds of thousands of GB200s into a single seamless cluster.
Congrats to all the teams who made this possible! https://t.co/O586ioWkJK
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) April 16, 2026
Source: WCCFTech
