Microsoft recently announced that it will spend an additional $4 billion in the next three years to build a second data center near an existing facility in Mount Pleasant, located in the southeastern part of the state, south of Milwaukee and close to Lake Michigan.
The company already has committed $3.3 billion toward an AI data center scheduled to come online in early 2026, according to a statement from Microsoft. Hiring has begun for that operation.
That facility “will house hundreds of thousands of the world’s most powerful NVIDIA GPUs, operating in seamless clusters connected by enough fiber to wrap the planet four times over,” according to the statement.
Such processors will enable training for frontier AI models, which, according to one source, “represent the cutting edge of artificial intelligence technology, pushing the boundaries of what AI can achieve.”
According to Microsoft, the processors from the data center set to open in 2026 have “ten times the performance of today’s fastest supercomputers,” and will spark “breakthroughs” in science, medicine and other fields.
The new data centers in the state also will offer jobs for residents, including via training for students and partnerships with local companies, Microsoft says.
Microsoft still must obtain local approvals for its new data center project, and, as of yet, there are few signs of organized opposition among officials and residents, even though criticism has emerged about the secrecy of the project.
But it’s a reasonable bet that critics will speak out at upcoming hearings regarding the project, at least if one considers previous data center efforts in other areas.
Common areas for criticism include the massive power and water demands for data centers — issues already in play in Wisconsin and other states. Some local governments, in fact, have proposed pauses on data center construction.
Microsoft, in its statement about the fresh data center investment, addressed such concerns.
It said, for instance, that a “state-of-the-art closed-loop liquid cooling system” will help keep water use “modest, requiring roughly the amount of water a typical restaurant uses annually or what an 18-hole golf course consumes weekly in peak summer.”
The company also said that it will prepay for energy and electrical infrastructure to keep down power costs for residents — and do so in part via a “new 250 MW solar project … that is under construction.”
