The Worlds Most Powerful AI Data Centre Developed by Microsoft Will Go Online in 2026
It delivers roughly 10× the performance of the fastest existing supercomputers in certain AI training scenarios.
Microsoft has revealed its new Fairwater datacentre in Wisconsin, describing it as the largest and most sophisticated AI facility it has ever built. The campus spans 315 acres and three buildings totaling 1.2 million square feet, featuring deep foundational work, tens of millions of pounds of steel, and hundreds of miles of infrastructure to support frontier AI workloads.
If intelligence is the log of compute… it starts with a lot of compute! And that’s why we’re scaling our GPU fleet faster than anyone else.
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) September 18, 2025
Just last year, we added over 2 gigawatts of new capacity – roughly the output of 2 nuclear power plants.
And today we’re going further,… pic.twitter.com/cZJ3pdN1rX
Unlike traditional cloud data centres built for many small, independent workloads, Fairwater is designed to operate like a giant supercomputer. With hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 GPUs connected via high-bandwidth NVLink, the new centre delivers roughly 10× the performance of the fastest existing supercomputers in certain AI training scenarios.
"In addition to our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin, we also have multiple identical Fairwater datacentres under construction in other locations across the US," Microsoft further revealed.
One of the facility’s standout features is its environmentally conscious cooling system. It uses closed-loop liquid cooling, with 90% of its capacity avoiding water waste after initial setup. The system includes massive water-cooling plants, fan banks, and piping configurations to maintain high performance without overheating.
"With Fairwater, we're charting a new path: doing the hard engineering work, bringing compute, network, and storage into one highly scaled cluster, and designing closed-loop energy systems to meet real-world computing needs," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said.
Storage and networking are similarly upgraded. The infrastructure supports exabyte-scale datasets, millions of read/write operations per second, and a tightly coupled network topology with low latency across racks and pods using NVLink, NVSwitch, InfiniBand, and high-speed Ethernet.
Microsoft says Fairwater will power services such as OpenAI and Microsoft Copilot, and is part of a global network of AI-optimised datacentres under construction, including sites in Norway and the UK.
According to Microsoft, the adoption of such supercomputer-scale infrastructure, when deployed across its global cloud regions, could democratize access to AI, enabling even large models to train faster and operate more efficiently for customers everywhere.
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