(Bloomberg) — Microsoft Corp. plans to spend $80 billion this fiscal year to build data centers, underscoring the intense capital needs of artificial intelligence.
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More than half of that projected spending through June 2025 will be in the United States, Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a blog post Friday. Recent advances in AI are driven by “large-scale infrastructure investments that provide the critical foundation for innovation and use of AI,” Smith wrote.
Cloud infrastructure providers like Microsoft and Amazon.com Inc. have rushed to increase computing capacity by building new data centers. In the previous fiscal year ending June 2024, Microsoft spent more than $50 billion on capital expenditures, the vast majority of which was related to building a server farm fueled by demand for server services. artificial intelligence.
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Smith also warned the new Trump administration against “harsh regulations” related to AI. “The most important priority of American public policy should be to ensure that the American private sector can continue to advance with the wind at its back,” Smith wrote.
The country needs “a pragmatic export control policy that balances strong security protection of AI components in trusted data centers with the ability of U.S. companies to grow rapidly and provide a source of reliable supply to the many countries that are allies and friends of the United States,” Smith. wrote.
Much of the data center spending is on high-power chips from companies such as Nvidia Corp. and infrastructure providers such as Dell Technologies Inc. Huge AI-enabled server farms require a lot of power, prompting Microsoft to strike a deal to reopen a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania, site of a famous partial meltdown in 1979. Amazon and Google have also signed nuclear energy agreements.
(Updates with additional context on data centers in sixth paragraph.)
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