Microsoft said that it “slows down or took a break” from part of its construction of data centers, including a $ 1 billion project in Ohio, the latest sign that the demand for artificial intelligence technology that has led a massive expansion of infrastructure may not need as much powerful as expected computers.
The technology giant confirmed this week that he stopped projects in the start -up phase on the rural land she has in the County County of the Ohio center, outside Columbus, and will reserve two of the three sites for agricultural land.
“In recent years, the demand for our Cloud and AI services has increased more than what we could never have planned and to respond to this opportunity, we have started to execute the most important and ambitious infrastructure project in our history,” said Noelle Walsh, president of Microsoft Cloud operations, in an article on LinkedIn.
Walsh said that “any new important business in this size and on the scale requires agility and refinement as we learn and grow with our customers. What it means is that we slow down or breaks certain projects at an early stage. ”
Microsoft did not say on Wednesday what other projects he had slowed down outside Ohio, but at the end of December, he revealed that he was stopping the later phases of a large data center project in Wisconsin.
TD Cowen analysts reported earlier this year that Microsoft has also reduced part of its expansion from the international data center and canceled certain leases in the United States for the use of data centers operated by other companies.
Other analysts for months have equaled some of the changes in a change in the close relationship of Microsoft with its trading partner Openai, Chatgpt manufacturer.
“Openai moved in a direction” by prioritizing the development of increasingly advanced AI systems, which require large computer resources to train on data of data, while “Microsoft may not have moved this same direction,” said Craig Ellis, director of research at B. Riley Securities.
The two companies announced on January 21 that they modified the agreement which had made Microsoft the exclusive supplier of OPENAI computer power, allowing the small business to strengthen its own capacity, “mainly for the research and training of models”. It is the same day that the new president of President Donald Trump praised the OpenAI partnership with Oracle and SoftBank to promise $ 500 billion new IA 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 generation of AI Boom has accelerated the demand for such installations, both to train new AI systems and to make them work as millions of people are starting to use chatbots and other AI tools at work and at home.
IT that is needed to execute AI tools is expensive and requires a large amount of electricity – to the point that Trump this week cited AI needs as part of the justification for Use your emergency authorities To stimulate the American coal industry, a reliable but polluting source of energy. Technological companies have also sought to draw from nuclear energy, including a Revival supported by Microsoft proposed Among the closed factory of three miles in Pennsylvania, which would feed an electrical network providing Ohio data centers as in Virginia, the largest data centers center in the country.
Microsoft has said that it still planned to spend more than $ 80 billion worldwide to extend its IA infrastructure, which ends in June, and has already doubled its data center capacity in the past three years.
“Although we can strategically punctuate our plans, we will continue to grow strongly and allocate investments that remain aligned with commercial priorities and customer demand,” said Walsh.
The Ohio break was nevertheless a disappointment for local officials.
Licking County has also attracted investments in data centers from Microsoft Rivals Google and Meta Platforms and a long-awaited semiconductive factory of Intel, although the manufacturer of fleas in difficulty in difficulty In February, repelled The expected completion date on the first stage of the project at 2030.
