Today Microsoft announced its plans to bring a Fairwater AI data center, which it claims is the " world's most powerful," online in early 2026. The $3.3 billion construction in Wisconsin is housed at the site of Foxconn' s failed LCD factory which was announced in 2017, but by the end of 2018 was already being called a " boondoggle."
According to Microsoft, MAI-1-preview uses an in-house mixture-of-experts model that was pre-trained and post-trained on 15,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, a more modest infrastructure than the 100,000 H100 cluster sizes reportedly used for model development by some rivals. However, with an eye to ramping up performance, Microsoft AI is now running MAI-1-preview on Nvidia's more powerful GB200 cluster, the company said.