Think of a complex so extensive that it could be confused with an industrial city, where each square meter is designed so that the artificial intelligence Do not stop for a moment. Thus the new Microsoft campus in Wisconsin (United States) is configured. The goal they announce is overwhelming: Render ten times more than the fastest supercomputer of the moment, a message with which they want to make it clear that the battle for AI is played on the computer scale.
A data center of this type does not resemble that of a traditional cloud where emails or web pages are housed. It is conceived to train and execute large -scale AI models, such as those that drive applications such as Chatgpt either COPILOT. According to the American company, the project will materialize at the beginning of 2026, after an initial investment of 3.3 billion dollars.
When the cloud becomes concrete, steel and many chips
The cloud does not float in the air. It rises on concrete soils, with metal structures, pipes and cables that travel underground kilometers. This is how it actually materializes, and Fairwater It is intended to be the most ambitious sample of it. According to Satya Nadellathis campus will become a strategic piece to hold loads that demand each time More energy and computing capacity. In the IA competition, having data centers of this scale is more than a matter of competitive advantage.
Fairwater’s key is how it organizes all that calculation power. The company explained that each rack integrates 72 GPU Nvidia Blackwell, Linked through NVLink and NVSWITCH to share up to 1.8 terabytes per second and access 14 terabytes of grouped memory. Of course, he has not detailed the exact number of racks that the campus will have and has limited himself to talking about “hundreds of thousands of accelerators” in total.
Together these systems will work as a single supercomputer capable of processing 865,000 tokens per seconda figure that gives an idea of the magnitude of the project, and will be part of a global network of the Azure Network Wide Network Wide Network
Beyond the technology that houses, Fairwater impresses with its physical dimensions. It rises on a land equivalent to more than one hundred hectares and adds more than 110,000 square meters of built area. Civil works, according to Microsoft, has required huge figures:
- 75 kilometers of foundation piles
- 12,000 tons of steel structure
- 193 kilometers of medium voltage electric wiring
- 117 kilometers of mechanical pipes
Refrigeration is one of the great challenges of any data center, and in Fairwater becomes even more critical for the chips density it houses. According to data from the Wisconsin Climatology Officethis state presents a Very marked thermal amplitude: In winter, minimum temperatures can fall below 0 ° C with abundant snow, while in summer stockings greater than 25 ° C are reached with high humidity. This variability forces us to have infrastructure that does not depend on a favorable climate, unlike locations in northern Europe where constant cold becomes a natural ally.
That is why Microsoft has opted for a liquid refrigeration system in closed circuit that only requires water once during construction and then reuses it without loss. According to the company, more than 90% of the capacity works with this method, supported by the second largest water coolers in the world and in 172 six -meter -high fans that help dissipate heat. The rest of the infrastructure takes advantage of the outer air, but changes to water in the hottest days, when the temperature and humidity exceed what the environment can offer. It is a design designed to maintain efficiency throughout the year in a place where the weather does not always play in favor.
Behind Fairwater there are more components designed to sustain datasets massive No bottlenecks. Let’s look at some of them:
- Total capacity in exabytes
- “Five soccer fields” size systems
- More than two million reading/writing operations per second in each cloud storage account
- Its own system that accelerates access to data and reduces latency, guaranteeing that GPUs never stop
- Enough optical fiber to give 4.5 turns to earth.
Fairwater is, for the moment, a project under construction and many of its promises must still be tested. Microsoft states that when starting at the beginning of 2026 it will be able to perform until ten times more than the fastest supercomputer of the world, although it does not need which one refers to. The true magnitude of Fairwater will only be known when we enter into operation and we can contrast if those figures are fulfilled beyond paper.
Images | Microsoft (1, 2, 3, 4) | Xataka with Gemini 2.5
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