Microsoft He said he is “slowing down or pausing” part of the construction of its data centers, including a $ 1,000 million project in Ohio, in what it represents the most recent signal that the demand for technology of artificial intelligence that promoted a massive infrastructure expansion may not need as many powerful computers as expected.
The technological giant confirmed this week that it is leaving projects in initial stages on rural land that it has in Licking County, in the center of Ohio, outside Columbus, and will reserve two of the three sites for agricultural land.
“In recent years, the demand for our cloud services and Ia grew more than we could have anticipated and to take advantage of this opportunity, we began to execute the largest and most ambitious infrastructure escalation project in our history,” said Noelle Walsh, president of Microsoft cloud computing operations, in a LinkedIn post.
Walsh said that “any new significant entrepreneurship of this size and scale requires agility and refinement as we learn and grow with our clients. What this means is that we are slowing down or pausing some projects in initial stages.”
Microsoft did not specify on Wednesday what other projects have slowed out of Ohio, but at the end of December he revealed that he was leaving the subsequent phases of a large data center project in Wisconsin.
TD Cowen analysts reported earlier this year that Microsoft was also reducing part of its international expansion of data centers and canceling some leases in the United States for the use of data centers operated by other companies.
1 /12 | How to create an image using the artificial intelligence of Microsoft: Copilot. Among the abilities that Microsoft’s artificial intelligence has, Copilot, is to generate images like this according to the instructions and need of users. – Artificial intelligence
Other analysts have linked for months some of the changes to a change in Microsoft’s close relationship with its commercial partner OpenAIcreator of Chatgpt.
“Openai was moving in one direction” by prioritizing the development of more advanced AI systems, which require vast computer resources to train in large quantities of data, while “Microsoft may not have been moving in that same direction,” said Craig Ellis, director of Research at B. Riley Securities.
The two companies announced on January 21 that they were altering the agreement that Microsoft had made the exclusive supplier of Openai’s computer power, allowing the smallest company to build its own capacity, “mainly for research and training of models.” It was the same day that the newly opened president Donald Trump He promoted the Openai association with Oracle and Softbank to compromise $ 500,000 million in new AI infrastructure in the United States, starting with a Data Center in Texas.
Microsoft has long built data centers worldwide to execute its cloud computing services. The boom of the generative AI accelerated the demand for such facilities, both to train new AI systems and to keep them working as millions of people begin to use chatbots and other AI tools at work and at home.
The necessary computing to execute AI tools is expensive and requires a lot of electricity, so much that Trump this week mentioned the needs of AI as part of the justification to use its emergency authorities to boost the already decadent United States coal industrya reliable but polluting source. Technology companies have also sought to take advantage of nuclear energy, including a proposal backed by Microsoft to relive the closed Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania, which would feed an electric network that supplies data centers in Ohio, as well as in Virginia, the largest data center in the country.
Microsoft said that it still plans to spend more than $ 80,000 million worldwide to expand its AI infrastructure this fiscal year, which ends in June, and has already doubled its capacity of data centers in the last three years.
“While we can strategically adjust our plans, we will continue to grow strongly and assign investments that remain aligned with commercial priorities and customer demand,” Walsh said.
Nevertheless, The Pause in Ohio was a disappointment for local officials.
Licking County has also attracted investments in data centers of Microsoft, Google and Meta Platforms, and a highly anticipated semiconductor factory of Intel, although the chips manufacturer in difficulties in February delayed the expected end date for the first stage of the project until 2030.