Microsoft has taken an ambitious step in the field of artificial intelligence, announcing Fairwater, the world’s most powerful AI data center. Located in Pleasantville, Wisconsin, the facility will be operational in early 2026.
Microsoft unveils Fairwater data center
Built on a 315-acre site on the site of a former Foxconn LCD factory, Fairwater consists of three buildings and a total area of 111,000 square meters. The data center, expected to cost $3.3 billion, will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs.
According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, these GPUs will be connected by fiber optic cables long enough to wrap around the world 4.5 times. This massive system is expected to deliver 10 times the performance of the fastest existing supercomputer. This comparison is believed to be made with xAI’s Colossus system.
Fairwater also focuses on environmental sustainability. Thanks to its closed-loop water cooling technology, the facility will have “zero water waste.” Water filled into the system during construction will be continuously reused.
Heated water in the data center is cooled by cooling fins equipped with 172 6-meter fans before being returned to the system. The company claims this facility is the second largest water-cooled chiller facility in the world.
Approximately 10 percent of the data center will consist of conventional servers. These servers will normally be cooled with outside air, switching to water cooling only on extremely hot days.
Fairwater, a massive engineering project, involves 74 kilometers of deep foundation piles, 12,000 tons of structural steel, 193 kilometers of medium-voltage underground cable, and 117 kilometers of mechanical piping. The storage systems alone are the length of five football fields.
