Microsoft Fairwater

The sites

Two Fairwater Campuses Live, Four Large Sites Coming

Microsoft publishes buildings, GPUs and dollars, not megawatts. Live figures below are Epoch AI estimates from satellite images and permits.

• Microsoft-run
• Own power plant
• Leased campus
• Neocloud contract

For Microsoft's other Texas sites, see Microsoft's Texas Compute on AustinIO.

Fairwater design

Closed-Loop Liquid Cooling, No Backup Power for the GPUs

• Wisconsin: 315 acres, three buildings and 1.2 million sq ft under roof. Racks of 72 Nvidia Blackwell GPUs (GB200) form one flat network of "hundreds of thousands" of GPUs. Microsoft put $3.3B into the first phase and $4B into a second data center of similar size; Mount Pleasant approved 15 more buildings in January 2026.
• Cooling: closed-loop liquid cooling serves more than 90% of capacity with no water lost to evaporation, fed by what Microsoft calls the second-largest water-cooled chiller plant in the world. The rest is air-cooled.
• Atlanta: two-story halls, racks of about 140 kW, and grid power only, with no onsite generation, UPS or dual-corded power for the GPU fleet.
• AI WAN: a dedicated backbone ties Atlanta, Wisconsin and earlier supercomputers into what Microsoft calls an "AI superfactory"; it added more than 120,000 fiber miles across the US in a year.

See Liquid Cooling and Cluster Layer.

Project Kilby

Kilby Runs on Its Own Gas Plant, With No Grid Tie

• Power deal: a 20-year contract announced June 22, 2026, with Energy Forge One, a Chevron company, and Engine No. 1. The plant is about 2.67 GW of gas, built in phases, mostly GE Vernova turbines plus Solar Turbines units, cooled with brackish groundwater.
• Data center: about 2 GW, reported; Microsoft calls it "multi-billion-dollar" with more than 6,000 construction jobs.
• Ownership: Chevron's June release calls Energy Forge One wholly owned; an October report calls it a 50/50 venture with Engine No. 1's new power company, Joulent.
• Timing: investment decision due by the end of 2026 and first power in 2028. Governor Abbott's September 2026 pause on new data center environmental permits may push the decision into 2027; Chevron still targets 2028, and earthworks have started.

Neocloud contracts

More Than $60B of Rented GPU Capacity

Microsoft also leases 900 MW at Crusoe's second Abilene campus, capacity Oracle and OpenAI declined next to Stargate Abilene. See Stargate.

OpenAI and MAI

OpenAI and Microsoft's Own Models Share Fairwater

• OpenAI: in the October 2025 restructuring, OpenAI committed to buy another $250B of Azure, and Microsoft holds about 27% of OpenAI. An April 2026 amendment lets OpenAI serve its products on any cloud, with Azure still first.
• Who uses Fairwater: OpenAI has described training on Fairwater supercomputers; Epoch lists OpenAI and Microsoft as likely users of both sites. No split has been published.
• MAI models: Microsoft launched seven MAI models on June 2, 2026, citing a new GB200 cluster without naming its site.

Power

Utility Gas in Wisconsin, Its Own Gas in Texas, Nuclear in Pennsylvania

• Wisconsin: state regulators approved two We Energies gas plants in May 2025, largely for Microsoft: Oak Creek, 1,100 MW, and Paris, 128 MW of engines. We Energies cites about 2.6 GW of new Microsoft demand. Microsoft also signed a 250 MW solar contract in Portage County.
• Crane Clean Energy Center: Constellation is restarting Three Mile Island Unit 1, 835 MW, under a 20-year contract with Microsoft, with a $1B Energy Department loan. The target is 2027; Constellation asked federal regulators in April 2026 to move grid rights from its Eddystone station to keep that date.
• Helion: a fusion contract for at least 50 MW from the Orion plant in Malaga, Washington, by 2028; construction began July 2025.

See Nuclear Power and Onsite Gas.

Chips and capex

Maia Runs Copilot; Nvidia Runs Fairwater

• Maia 200: TSMC 3 nm, 216 GB of HBM3e, 750 W. First deployed in Des Moines, Iowa, then Phoenix; by October 2026 in the US, Europe and Australia, running Copilot and MAI work.
• Maia 300: in production from 2027, part of what Microsoft calls multi-gigawatt Maia deployments.
• Capital spending: $145.3B in fiscal 2026, about two-thirds on IT hardware; Microsoft brought 88 data centers online and added about 1 GW in the fourth quarter alone. Guidance for fiscal 2027 is about $175B. Results for the September quarter come October 28, 2026.

Related coverage

Related Coverage

• Stargate
• Largest Data Centers in the US
• AWS Project Rainier
• Google Project Tembo
• Business Models and Ownership