President Biden joined Microsoft executives to announce plans to invest $3.3 billion to expand the company's data center campus in southwest Wisconsin, the latest move by a tech giant to ramp up development of projects needed for artificial intelligence and other advanced computing projects.
The project on hundreds of acres in Mount Pleasant — about 30 miles south of Milwaukee — will be “among the world’s most advanced AI and cloud data centers” and employ more than 2,000 workers at its scheduled opening in 2026, Microsoft President Brad Smith said during an appearance Wednesday at Gateway Technical College with Biden.
The project is on land where former President Trump and electronics manufacturer Foxconn in 2017 announced plans build a $10 billion factory to make parts for Apple’s iPhone. Taiwan-based Foxconn dramatically scaled back its plans over the next few years.
Some of the nation’s biggest tech companies, including Google, Facebook parent Meta and Amazon, have announced billions in investments aimed at building the next generation of data centers, which are planned as the infrastructure backbone to handle the massive energy loads required for AI and cloud computing.
The data center sector is a bright spot for investors and lenders in an otherwise moribund U.S. commercial property market, JLL CEO Christian Ulbrich told investors during the company’s recent earnings call.
“It’s the hottest asset class at the moment. The demand is really high, and when you believe in AI, the demand for data centers will only go up,” Ulbrich told Bloomberg TV this week.
Private-equity giant Blackstone owns at least $50 billion in data centers globally, including facilities under construction with another $50 billion in prospective future development, Blackstone Chairman Stephen Schwarzman said in a recent earnings call.
The companies have picked locations across the Midwest as well as Arizona, Nevada and Oregon for their combination of energy infrastructure, available land and water and a robust labor pool.
Biden touted his administration's CHIPS and Science Act passed in 2022 to spur domestic production of semiconductors, electric vehicle facilities and other programs aimed to jump-start American manufacturing and shift supply chains back to the United States from Asia.
Microsoft’s data center project in Racine County “will help operate one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world” and connect AI developers around the world, Biden said.
The tech company will partner with Gateway Technical College to train 1,000 people for data center and other jobs and will work to train 1,000 business leaders to adopt AI into their operations, according to a White House statement.