As the requirements of AI increase, Microsoft is set to spend $80 billion in 2025 building data centers. Microsoft President Brad Smith wrote in a recent blog post that over half of this anticipated amount will be spent through June 2025 in the United States.
In the last fiscal year ending June 2024, Microsoft invested over $50 billion on capital expenses, most of which were in relation to server farm construction led by the increasing demand for AI services.
Smith also discussed the concern of “heavy-handed regulations” on AI from the upcoming Trump administration. Smith wrote, “The most important US public-policy priority should be to ensure that the US private sector can continue to advance with the wind at its back.”
Smith continues that the U.S. needs “a pragmatic export control policy that balances strong security protection for AI components in trusted data centers with an ability for US companies to expand rapidly and provide a reliable source of supply to the many countries that are American allies and friends.”
Most data center spending is on high-powered chips from companies like Nvidia and infrastructure providers including Dell Technologies.
These enormous AI-enabled server farms need large amounts of power, which led to Microsoft making a deal to reopen a reactor at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, where a partial meltdown occurred in 1979. Other major players Google and Amazon have also jumped on the wagon and signed nuclear power agreements.
