Microsoft boasts about humongous datacenter on abandoned Foxconn site in Wisconsin

Microsoft's CEO has claimed the operating system-slinger is building the "world's largest datacenter." In an X post on Thursday, Satya Nadella said that the datacenter Microsoft has built at Fairwater, Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, would be ten times faster than the world's largest supercomputer, have "hundreds of thousands of …

[elDog]

Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

Now it will be known for another energy-sucking hub that is used to steal whatever human intelligence it can, empty the wonderful lakes and aquifers, pollute the air so the cows and nice people can't live there anymore.

All this chasing that 'AI' buzzword that makes the corporate C-suite and shareholders rich while the rest of us ask WTF?

[herman]

Re: Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

If you bothered to actually read the article before spouting off, you may have noticed that it uses direct dry cooling and solar power.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

But the cows and the people still use a lot of water and pollute the air.

[herman]

Re: Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

Cows… geez, you are such a misogynist…

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

They'll need batteries to keep the power on at nights. I hope they weren't planning to get them from Georgia.

[Irongut]

Re: Wisconsin - used to be known for dairy and nice people

@herman And iff you had understood what you read you would know it will have at most 50% solar power with the rest coming from fossil fuels.

[IGotOut]

Green washing

"Microsoft is currently building a 250 MW solar farm so that it can match every kilowatt hour it uses from fossil fuels with a matching quantity of renewable energy"

So the Vampire Business will also be using a 250MW fossil fuelled plant then?

[Like a badger]

Re: Green washing

Doubt they'd build a custom power plant to directly support their operations (standby plant certainly), so the DC will be powered by whatever the local grid marginal source is, which is likely to be gas, but could be coal at some times of the year.

But something doesn't stack up here. A 250 MWh solar plant in Wisconsin will have a solar capacity factor around 20%, annual output around 438 GWh, and that's going to match total demand? Assuming that a mix of AI and hyperscaler loads mean the facility runs at net 70% utilisation, then that would imply a peak load of 70 MW* and that's nowhere near the worlds largest DC.

* Help me out, my reasoning is solid but ICBA to do the numbers properly.

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Green washing

Promised 250MW solar plants purely for offsetting don't have to take into account actual efficiency and usage.

It's like buying carbon credits, you just have to be able to report it - it doesn't have to actually work.

Although given the current administration, Microsoft probably have to promise to buy 250MW of coal power to offset any solar energy they produce

[MachDiamond]

Re: Green washing

"but could be coal at some times of the year."

Coal is around 31% of WI power mix. Natural gas is 41%. Nuclear 15.5% and everything else making up the difference. It would take a bunch of work to drill down to what it might be at the specific site. M$ should be required to build out a 1MW (nameplate) solar plant with storage to make sure they won't be crashing the local grid and knocking others off.

[MaChatma CoatGPT 2.0]

"Ten times faster than the world's largest supercomputer"

Maybe don't build a massive data centre with hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GB200s. Maybe a modest shed with ten supercomputers inside.

[Paul Herber]

Re: "Ten times faster than the world's largest supercomputer"

In Jacksonville they have two sheds.

[Doctor Syntax]

"Foxconn initially promised 30,000 jobs, then reduced that number to 13,000, and ultimately delivered just 281."

How many does it take to run a data centre?

"Foxconn abandoned the project ... Badger State locals wondering if they were going to get hosed again,"

And once the AI bubble bursts it may well happen again.

[IGotOut]

Less than that.

I can't find the article but a typical MS one has about 50.

Found this from a DC provider which would match up that figure

https://optrium.co.uk/how-many-people-are-needed-to-run-a-data-centre/

[Irongut]

If you read the article MS are claiming 800 for this one.

[MachDiamond]

"If you read the article MS are claiming 800 for this one. "

Of course the are. They have run the calcs to estimate how much the state will give them in cash, tax abatements, free infrastructure upgrades, etc. If they said 10k, somebody might have called BS. 800 seems excessive, but not too far out that they can't make some shit up.

[MachDiamond]

"How many does it take to run a data centre?"

Not a whole lot but the 30K number got the state to hand them $3bn. As if Foxconn needed the money!

There should be a ban on government paying companies to build facilities. The ones they're giving money to have piles of it already and will site their facilities where it makes the most sense to have them long term. What they do is tease several locations to get a bidding war going and then choose the one where they'd have gone if there were no handouts.

[disk iops]

A certain 7 building campus in Manassas VA has 3-5 security per building per 12hr shift. Min staffing is 2. Facility "customer service" and vendor coordination is 8 more during business hours. M$ (and the other big7) hire their own augmented and armed security staff (one of the common firms that you commonly see providing shopping mall security) at 2 or 3 per shift per building where they have data halls.

So call it 6 people per shift per building. Or probably even fewer than what Foxconn ended up with. House electricians or HVAC are typically contracted out and simply on-call.. So more jobs that are not perm nor resident.

The construction of a site was probably 100 people at any given time. The mud workers are rotated out once the walls are standing and their employment is over. Then pipe-fitters and electricians move in. From greenfield to ready for customer load takes about 8-10 months in northern VA but we do these builds constantly and its a well-oiled process. In bumbfk Wisconsin it might take longer because of Union horseshit and adverse weather. NTTData dropped 4 new datacenters into Loudoun inside of 10 months.

Datacenters don't take "years" unless you don't already have the permits, and don't have the high-tension wires and sub-stations built out. Given that the MS/Foxxcon site is an established industrial location there is no lead time there.

[ChrisElvidge]

I remember when

Mount Pleasant was a GPO sorting office.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: I remember when

Makes sense: not too far from Chicago and Milwaukee, with Rochester (IL) and Madison a little further out.

This project might require updated datalinks to these major urban centers. If I had money to invest, that could be something to leverage.

[My other car WAS an IAV Stryker]

Re: I remember when

D'oh! Rockford, not Rochester. My memory is going...

[MachDiamond]

Re: I remember when

"This project might require updated datalinks to these major urban centers. If I had money to invest, that could be something to leverage."

There might be a bunch of dark fiber already in the ground left over from the installation boom years ago. Even if the fibre could use an upgrade, the piping will be in place making it comparatively cheap.

[has been]

Re: I remember when

Still is:-

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Pleasant_Mail_Centre

[Mickey Porkpies]

wah wah green wah wah

MS have an army of people convincing you they are green whatever they do. The race to the beat the AI bubble bursting will render billions of e waste that will make the 400 million tons of windows 10 pcs seem like small change. We will all be huddled around fires sipping puddle water while all our resources are burnt up so they can solve a problem that was theirs in the making.

[I am David Jones]

If Foxcon’s promised vs actual jobs is anything to go by, then we can expect one-off jobs for 28 builders and ongoing jobs for 7 operators. Hooray.

[MachDiamond]

Maybe 7 operators per shift and a couple of minimum wage security guards. When I had a manufacturing company, I had many more than that on payroll but no gov agency was giving me any money. Not even a loan I had to pay back.

[Blackjack]

Wanna bet this will be abandoned again once the crazy orange is no longer president?

[disk iops]

crazy orange has nothing to do with the incentive. This is just an already pre-built location with half of the cake already made. Just need finishing operations. It's a cheap ante into building more AI "compute". It's probably a lot cheaper to operate than many other MS cites (including NoVA) so when the AI balloon pops in less than 2 years, old/small sites in NoVA are more likely to face the ax than this one.

The sites in Oregon and Washington have dirt cheap electricity so those will stick around.

[headrush]

"cuts water needs to the equivalent of the yearly use of an American restaurant"

Yeah, mcdonalds.

Worldwide

*for some values of "restaurant"

**no mention of the time period it would need that equivalent usage over. A year? A month? A day?