Microsoft announced today that it will bring Fairwater, a purpose-built AI datacenter in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, online in early 2026. The new site is designed as the most powerful datacenter on the planet, serving as a hub for next-generation model training and inference. The campus covers 315 acres with roughly 1.2 million square feet across three buildings and will house hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs linked by fiber, which can reportedly circle the globe 4.5 times. While we don't have information on the exact GPU count, Microsoft claims the installation will deliver about 10x the performance of today's fastest supercomputers for frontier AI workloads. With the fastest already deployed cluster being xAI's Colossus 1, this means that this system could have over half a million "Blackwell" and "Blackwell Ultra" GPUs.

Over 90% of compute capacity will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system that is filled during construction and continuously recirculated, backed by what the company describes as the planet's second-largest water-cooled chiller plant. Around 10% of servers will rely on outside air and switch to water cooling only on the hottest days. Storage and I/O are scaled for exabyte-class datasets, and the buildout involved 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable, 72.6 miles of mechanical piping, and an external cooling array that includes 172 20-foot fans.