New Microsoft datacenter mimics 'one massive AI supercomputer'

Microsoft has unveiled Fairwater, a new datacenter in Mt. Pleasant, Wisconsin, designed to function as “one massive AI supercomputer” with 10 times the performance of today’s fastest supercomputers. Spanning 315 acres and comprising three buildings totaling 1.2 million square feet, Fairwater is built specifically to power AI workloads using hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs interconnected in high-density clusters. The facility employs NVIDIA GB200 servers with 72 GPUs per rack linked via NVLink for high-bandwidth communication and pooled memory, enabling processing speeds of up to 865,000 tokens per second. This architecture allows the datacenter to operate as a single global supercomputer rather than isolated machines, minimizing network latency through a two-story layout that reduces physical distances between racks. In addition to Fairwater, Microsoft is constructing similar hyperscale AI datacenters in Narvik, Norway, and the U.K., with plans to use NVIDIA’s upcoming GB300 chips. The Wisconsin facility features a closed