Microsoft Vice President and President Brad Smith attends the first day of Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, November 12, 2024. The world’s largest technology conference this year has 71,528 attendees from 153 countries and 3,050 businesses, with AI emerging as the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to build data centers capable of handling artificial intelligence workloads, the company announced Friday. blog post.
More than half of the expected spending on AI infrastructure will take place in the United States, Microsoft Vice President and President Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year ends in June.
“Today, the United States is leading the global race to AI thanks to private capital investment and innovations from American companies of all sizes, from dynamic start-ups to established companies,” he said. Mr. Smith said. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this first-hand through our partnership with OpenAI, with growing companies like Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-powered software platforms and applications.”
Several top tech companies are rushing to spend billions Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running AI models. The rapid release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, launching in late 2022, has started the AI race for companies to provide their own generative AI capabilities. Having invested more than 13 billion dollars in OpenAI, Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure to the startup and has integrated its models into Windows, Teams and other products.
Microsoft reported $20 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired under finance leases worldwide, including $14.9 billion spent on property, plant and equipment, in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Capital spending will increase sequentially in the second quarter of the fiscal year, said Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer. in October.
Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha expected $63.2 billion in property, plant and equipment additions in fiscal 2025, implying 42% year-over-year growth.
Microsoft’s revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 33% in the fiscal first quarter, with 12 percentage points coming from AI services.
Smith called the president-elect Donald TrumpThe new US administration will need to protect the country’s leadership in AI through education and promotion of US AI technologies abroad.
“China is starting to offer developing countries subsidized access to rare chips, and it is promising to build local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese wisely recognize that if a country standardizes on the Chinese AI platform, it will likely continue to rely on that platform in the future.”
He added: “The best response for the United States is not to complain about the competition but to make sure we win the race ahead.” This will require us to act quickly and effectively to promote American AI as a superior alternative. »
