Microsoft plans to pour $80B into cloud data centers

The tech giant will funnel more than half of the investments into U.S.-based facilities, Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said Friday.

Dive Brief:

• Microsoft expects to spend roughly $80 billion on AI-enabled data centers to train large language models and deploy AI and cloud-based applications during its current fiscal year, the company’s Vice Chair and President Brad Smith said in a Friday blog post. 
• More than half of the investments will be in the U.S., according to Smith. The tech giant’s current fiscal year 2025 runs through June 30.
• AI workloads triggered cloud capacity constraints last year, ratcheting up an ongoing data center building boom. Microsoft responded by nearly doubling capital investments to $20 billion in the first quarter of its 2025 fiscal year, CFO Amy Hood said during an October earnings call. “We expect capital expenditures to increase on a sequential basis ...