Microsoft has launched its first networked “AI superfactory,” linking its new two-story Fairwater data center in Atlanta with a sister site in Wisconsin to accelerate large-scale artificial-intelligence work.
According to a blog post from Microsoft, the Atlanta facility, located in South Fulton County near Palmetto, began operation in October. The data center is connected to Wisconsin using a dedicated fiber-optic “AI WAN” (wide area network) to create a massive supercomputer running on Nvidia chips.
According to Microsoft, this approach means that instead of a single facility training an AI model, multiple sites work in tandem on the same task—enabling what the company calls a “superfactory” capable of training models in weeks instead of months.
Microsoft said in the blog post that connecting data centers is needed to support newer, larger AI models.
Microsoft announced in 2021 that it planned to make Atlanta one of its major hubs, with new data centers and a 90-acre campus on the Westside. While the campus was put on indefinite hold in 2023, the data centers in South Fulton and Douglasville moved forward.
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