As
Microsoft invests billions of dollars to build a data center campus here in southeast Wisconsin, the company’s leaders see a future where all Wisconsin businesses can implement their own artificial intelligence-based solutions.
Microsoft’s
$3.3 billion data center campus in Mount Pleasant will support all of the company’s cloud services and have a special emphasis on AI. The Mount Pleasant campus will become part of Microsoft’s Midwest region.
The first phase of the project will be complete by 2026. Microsoft is already in the planning stages for phase two.
At a
Wisconsin Technology Council luncheon held Thursday,
Balamurugan Balakreshnan, chief artificial intelligence officer/architect for Microsoft, said several factors played into the company’s decision to build in Wisconsin.
“One is easy access to the highways, the I-94 corridor, water, and then resources like sewage -- and obviously land,” said Balakreshnan. “All those come together and are why we are putting our footprint in Wisconsin.”
Balakreshnan said several people have asked him what Microsoft gains from its sizable investment here in Wisconsin.
Microsoft looks at the data center as a resource for the entire business community, he explained. The company hopes to train the local workforce in AI so that everyone can leverage the technology.
"It is not just the data scientist that is going to use AI,” said Balakreshnan. “Everybody is going to use AI. We built this data center for customers. I've seen innovation going on in every industry.”
The Mount Pleasant data center will support Microsoft’s Copilot, a generative AI chatbot launched by the company last February. The new data center, along with Microsoft’s software stack, will help democratize the use of AI across the region, according to Balakreshnan.
“The idea is everybody in Wisconsin, every company, can actually build their own copilots,” he said. “They can have their own AI digital twin to do some tangible work.”
A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical asset, system, or process that can be used to simulate, monitor, and optimize its performance.
Balakreshnan said the company is also working on creating its own microchip hardware to compete with companies like Santa Clara, California-based Nvidia. Microsoft is collaborating with several partnering organizations, including Santa Clara-based AMD (Advanced Micro Devices, Inc.), to try and innovate in the microchip space.
“This hardware that we are innovating will also go back to our data center as well,” said Balakreshnan. “We will also provide commodity hardware.”
As for the final size of the Mount Pleasant data center campus, Balakreshnan said Microsoft is still in a planning phase.
The company has been buying parcels of land that surround the current data center construction site.
Earlier this week, Microsoft purchased
another 166 acres of land along Louis Sorenson Road for nearly $50 million. In addition to this week’s purchases, since mid-August the company has purchased about 37.5 acres in Mount Pleasant from various property owners for a total of $10 million, according to state records.
Microsoft now owns a total of nearly 1,800 acres in Mount Pleasant.
"We are still in planning. Usually, data centers need one long stretch (of land)," said Balakreshnan. “We will build more and more data centers.”
[caption id="attachment_597026" align="aligncenter" width="1663"]
Microsoft's land holdings in Mount Pleasant as of Sept. 12, 2024. Map made using Google My Maps[/caption]
