Microsoft said that it is "in the final phases" of building its $3.3 billion Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, data center project.

At the same time, it said that it plans to spend an additional $4 billion over the next three years on a second data center of similar size and scale in the state. Microsoft said that it has multiple identical data centers under construction around the country.

The facility set to launch shortly is known as Fairwater, with Microsoft claiming that it will be the "world’s most powerful data center."

The company did not share benchmarks to validate the claims, but said that it will house hundreds of thousands of the Nvidia GB200 GPUs, connected by enough fiber "to wrap the planet four times over." It said that it will have ten times the performance of today’s fastest supercomputers, but provided no further details.

While traditional Azure data centers are designed for thousands of independent workloads, this site is expected to be used as a single AI facility, both for training and inference.

The Fairwater site spans 315 acres and comprises three large buildings with a combined 1.2 million sq ft (111,483 sqm) under roofs. Construction required 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.

Around 90 percent of the facility will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system, which the company says means that it will use roughly the amount of water a typical restaurant uses annually or what an 18-hole golf course consumes weekly in peak summer. The remaining 10 percent of traditional servers use outdoor air for cooling, but do use water "during the hottest days."

The facility will be matched by renewable PPAs, with Microsoft funding a new 250MW solar project in Portage County currently under construction.

The first data center is expected to employ around 500 full-time employees, growing to 800 once the second data center is complete.