Microsoft is more than doubling its multi-billion investment in Wisconsin, planning to build what it says will be the most advanced artificial intelligence data center in the world in Mount Pleasant.

The Redmond, Washington-based tech giant announced on Thursday that it plans to spend another $4 billion on an expansion of the data center campus that it has been building in Mount Pleasant. It’s a new phase of Microsoft’s development there after the company announced last year its plans to build a $3.3 billion data center on land once slated for Foxconn.

Construction on the first data center, located at the northwest corner of Hwy 195 and 90th Street, will be complete next year and will employ about 500 people, according to Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft.

The second data center, to be constructed on land Microsoft owns just west of its first data center, will be a similar scale as the first and will began operations before the end of 2028.

The facility will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia Blackwell GB200 graphics processing units that Smith said will handle training for “frontier AI models, delivering ten times the performance of today’s fastest supercomputers.”

“It’s an opportunity to keep growing,” Smith said at an announcement event held in Racine. “It is extraordinarily important, I think, for America’s leadership in the world in terms of the future of AI, America’s competition with China and the world, America’s ability to serve, literally, the rest of the world in terms of exporting our technology and services. All in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. That is an extraordinary.”

Smith estimates Microsoft’s data centers will employ 800 people combined once they are operational.

Read more at the BizTimes Milwaukee.