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Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith attends the first day of the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal on November 12, 2024. The world’s largest technology conference this year has 71,528 attendees from 153 countries and 3,050 AI companies. becomes the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franco/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 said in a blog post Friday.
More than half of expected AI infrastructure spending will come from the US, Microsoft vice chairman and president Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year ends in June.
“Today, the United States is leading the global AI race thanks to private equity investment and innovation by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic startups to well-established enterprises,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this firsthand through our partnerships with OpenAI, growing firms like Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”
Several top tech companies are rushing to spend billions on Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running artificial intelligence models. The rapid deployment of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, has started an AI race for companies to provide their own generative AI capabilities. Having invested money over $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure for the startup and has incorporated startup models into Windows, Teams, and other products.
Microsoft reported $20 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired through finance leases worldwide, of which $14.9 billion was spent on property and equipment in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Capital spending will continue to increase in the second fiscal quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said. in October.
Smith called on the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to protect the nation’s leadership in artificial intelligence through education and the promotion of US artificial intelligence technologies abroad.
“China is starting to offer developing countries subsidized access to scarce chips, and it is promising to build local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese are smart to understand that if a country standardizes on a Chinese AI platform, it will likely continue to rely on that platform in the future.
“The best response for the United States is not to complain about the competition, but to make sure we win the race ahead. That will require us to quickly and effectively advance American AI as the best alternative.”
