Microsoft is planning to bring the "world's most powerful" AI datacenter online in early 2026, the company announced today. The Pleasantville, Wisconsin-based datacenter, dubbed Fairwater, is. meant specifically for training AI models as well as running large-scale models. The datacenter will be housed on 315 acres of land, with 1.2 million square feet in three buildings to house "hundreds of thousands" of Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs.
If intelligence is the log of compute… it starts with a lot of compute! And that’s why we’re scaling our GPU fleet faster than anyone else.Just last year, we added over 2 gigawatts of new capacity – roughly the output of 2 nuclear power plants.And today we’re going further,… pic.twitter.com/cZJ3pdN1rXSeptember 18, 2025
On X, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote that these GPUs will be "connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times" and said that they will deliver ten times more performance than today's fastest supercomputer. This is likely a comparison to xAI's Colossus, which uses over 200,000 GPUs and 300 megawatts of power. Microsoft didn't specify its exact number of GPUs nor the expected power consumption.
Fairwater uses closed-loop water cooling, which the company suggests will have "zero water waste," with all of the water supplied once, at construction. In fact, Microsoft says it's the second-largest water-cooled chiller plant on Earth. Hot water will be sent out to cooling fins on each side of Fairwater, and then cooled with 172 20-foot fans before being sent back in to cool the GPUs again.
The other 10% will be traditional servers using outside air for cooling, and will move to water "only during the hottest days."
In a separate blog post, Microsoft president Brad Smith wrote that the company is working to avoid driving up electricity costs for surrounding communities.
The construction sounds immense. Executive vice president of Cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, wrote that the new datacenter uses "46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping." The datacenter's storage systems alone are "five football fields" long.
Beyond the Mount Pleasant facility, Guthrie adds that several identical Fairwater data centers are under construction elsewhere in the United States.
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