Microsoft announces world's biggest AI datacenter with hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs

Microsoft has announced that it has built the "world's most powerful AI datacenter" and the largest and "most sophisticated" AI factory that it's built to date. Called Fairwater, the facility is located in Wisconsin, US, and Microsoft has plans to construct identical Fairwater data centers across the country.

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"Fairwater is a seamless cluster of hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200s, connected by enough fiber to circle the Earth 4.5 times," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella writes on social media. "It will deliver 10x the performance of the world's fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen."

To give you a sense of scale, the Fairwater data center spans a massive 315 acres, comprising three large buildings that offer 1.2 million square feet of data center space. Fairwater is distinct from most data centers in that it's designed to function as a single, massive AI supercomputer, utilizing interconnected NVIDIA GB200 servers and the latest NVLink and NVSwitch technologies, which offer bandwidth measured in terabytes per second.

One of the most impressive aspects of this massive AI factory and supercomputer is its cooling system, which utilizes a facility-wide efficient closed-loop liquid cooling solution.

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"Traditional air cooling can't handle the density of modern AI hardware," Scott Guthrie, Microsoft Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI, explains. "Our datacenters use advanced liquid cooling systems - integrated pipes circulate cold liquid directly into servers, extracting heat efficiently. The closed-loop recirculation ensures zero water waste, with water only needed to fill up once, and then it is continually reused."

And when it comes to Microsoft's plans to build more Fairwater-sized facilities, the plan is to connect them all via a Wide Area Network (WAN) for a "distributed, resilient and scalable system that operates as a single, powerful AI machine." Just from a network engineering perspective, it's a remarkable achievement, and more proof that we're now deep into the AI factory era of computing.