Microsoft president says Mount Pleasant AI data center will be ‘among the world’s most advanced’

Just hours after plans were announced for Microsoft to spend $3.3 billion to build an artificial intelligence data center campus in Mount Pleasant, the company’s president talked about the impact the project will have on the state’s economy.

“We are going to be building among the world’s most advanced AI and cloud data centers that you will see anywhere,” said Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft.

The data center project will create 2,300 union construction jobs and 2,000 permanent jobs, according to an earlier announcement from the White House.

The supply chain for the construction of the facility will provide a major boost to the state’s manufacturing sector, Smith said in an event Wednesday held at the Gateway Technical College iMet Center in Sturtevant to announce the Microsoft project. The event was capped by remarks from President Joe Biden.

“It’s not just the jobs that we are creating here,” Smith said. “We are creating manufacturing jobs across the state of Wisconsin as we get steel from near Wausau, as we get chillers from La Crosse, as we get generators from near Madison. This is literally creating jobs across the state of Wisconsin.”

Through a partnership with Gateway, Microsoft will help create a “data center economy” that will train more than 1,000 people to fill the operational jobs that the new facility will require, according to Smith.

By the end of the decade, more than 100,000 Wisconsinites will be trained in AI through Microsoft’s various community partnerships, he said.

This includes a partnership with TitletownTech and the Green Bay Packers to create an AI Co-Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee’s Connected Systems Institute.

WEDC is providing a $500,000 grant to assist TitletownTech in opening a new, full-time TitletownTech-Milwaukee office within the Wisconsin AI Co-Innovation Lab.

Microsoft has AI Co-Innovation Labs in San Francisco and Redmond, Washington. The labs give businesses a space to build, develop, prototype and test their AI-centered solutions. Each company’s engineering team works directly with Microsoft experts who are knowledgeable about AI and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies.

Madison-based startup accelerator gener8tor has also been tapped to equip 1,000 business leaders with AI-related skills.

“This isn’t just about building a building and it’s not just about the manufacturing jobs of today,” said Smith. More than anything, this project is about using the future of AI to fuel the future of manufacturing companies and jobs and skills across the state of Wisconsin and around the country.”

Construction of the data center campus means long-term work for “hundreds of IBEW electricians” for the next 10 to 15 years, said Nick Fick, membership development coordinator for IBEW Local 430.

“They are calling this site Microsoft’s crown jewel. It will have the biggest footprint of any Microsoft facility in the world,” said Fick. “I now have the good fortune to have this job here at home organizing electricians into the IBEW.”

Microsoft’s Mount Pleasant data center is being constructed on land previously owned by Foxconn.

In March of 2023, Microsoft announced plans to build a $1 billion data center on a 315-acre site, which was part of the Foxconn development area. Foxconn relinquished its development rights for the site in order for it to be sold by the village to Microsoft, for $50 million. Microsoft said it expected to have 200 employees in the first phase of its Mount Pleasant data center development. The company also said that when fully developed, by 2034, the data center was expected to have 460 jobs, including 330 first-shift jobs and 130 second-shift jobs.

Then later in the year, Microsoft moved to significantly expand those plans. In November, after construction had already begun on the Microsoft data center, local officials announced that the company planned to purchase an additional 1,030 acres of land for the data center development. Details of Microsoft’s expanded plans weren’t disclosed at that time, but village and county officials said Microsoft planned to invest “billions” of dollars over the next decade on buildings, support structures, systems and equipment. In December, Microsoft spent $176 million to buy the 1,030 acres from the village and a private landowner.

New details about the Microsoft data center project in Mount Pleasant were announced today by Biden and Gov. Tony Evers. Biden spoke at Gateway Technical College today to tout the Microsoft project, and to criticize the Foxconn project and President Donald Trump’s support of it. Smith and Fick spoke before Biden.

Biden said the Microsoft data center in Mount Pleasant will “help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world. I’ve gone around the world, literally, meeting with the leading architects of AI.”

“It’s all a part of Microsoft’s broad plan to build an artificial intelligence ecosystem right here in Racine (County),” Biden said. “It’s going to be transformative. Not just here but worldwide.”