Microsoft, which has more than 5GW data center capacity, is increasing its investment in data centers. The details of the tech giant’s spending on digital services were shown in internal documents seen by Business Insider. The documents are said to be part of a secret slide deck prepared by the company’s cloud and revolution team earlier this year.
This revelation comes as no surprise considering Microsoft’s involvement in the AI boom through its partnership with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI which has added AI-powered functions to many of its products. This in turn has required notable additional spending on server size.
The leaked document reportedly shows that Microsoft has obtained more than 500MW of additional data center space since July 2023, implying that the company has more than 5GW of IT volume available.
To cater for the growing demand for data centers, Microsoft is looking to stimulate the growth of its data center footprint — doubling the amount of new data center volume it builds in the first half of the 2024 fiscal year and adding 1GW of server power over the next six months.
The leaked document also shows that Microsoft has been busy acquiring GPUs, the chips needed to train and run AI systems. The company made a multi-billion investment in OpenAI last year, with much of this thought to have come via cloud credits that allow OpenAI to use compute power from Microsoft’s Azure cloud programme.
Business Insider reports that Microsoft claims to have conveyed “record-level GPU capacity” in the second half of last year, more than doubling the number of stationed chips, though it does not put a number on this. The company’s GPU footprint is said to have grown by an additional 39 data centers meaning Microsoft now has live “AI collection” in 98 locations around the world.
As well as being a major customer of Nvidia, the company that makes the most popular and influential AI GPUs on the market, Microsoft has also expanded its own AI accelerator chip in-house. The Azure Maia 100, built on the Arm architecture, is used in the company’s cloud data centers.
Even as Microsoft races to increase its computing capacity, it’s yet to be seen if it’ll explore building more data centers in Africa. Recent developments reported publicly by Microsoft include a $2.9 billion investment in data center networks in Japan and a $3.16 billion spending spree in the UK. This will include a new data center campus being planned for the site of the Eggborough power station in North Yorkshire.
