Brad Smith, vice chairman and president of Microsoft, participates in the opening day of the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 12, 2024. This year, the world’s largest technology conference will feature AI, with 71,528 attendees from 3,050 companies in 153 countries. It has emerged as the most representative industry. (Photo credit: Rita Franca/NurPhoto, Getty Images)
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microsoft The company said in a blog post Friday that it plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal year 2025 to build data centers that can handle artificial intelligence workloads.
Microsoft Vice Chairman and President Brad Smith said more than half of the expected AI infrastructure spending will be in the United States. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year ends in June.
“Today, the United States is leading the global AI race thanks to private capital investment and innovation by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic startups to established companies,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this firsthand through our partnerships with startups like Anthropic and xAI, OpenAI, and through our own AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”
Some leading technology companies are rushing to invest billions of dollars. Nvidia Graphics processing unit for training and running AI models. The rapid adoption of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, launched in late 2022, has started an AI race for enterprises to offer their own generative AI capabilities. Microsoft, which has invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, is providing the startup with cloud infrastructure and building its model into Windows, Teams, and other products.
Microsoft reported $20.0 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired under finance leases worldwide during the first quarter of fiscal 2025, including $14.9 billion in property, plant and equipment. Capital expenditures will continue to increase in the fiscal second quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said. In October.
Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha expect $63.2 billion to be added to property, plant and equipment in fiscal 2025, suggesting a 42% year-over-year growth.
Microsoft’s revenue from Azure and other cloud services rose 33% in the fiscal first quarter, with 12 percentage points coming from AI services.
Smith called on President-elect Donald Trump to protect the nation’s leadership in AI through education and promoting the spread of American AI technology overseas.
“China has begun offering developing countries subsidized access to scarce chips and has pledged to build local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese have wisely recognized that once a country standardizes on a Chinese AI platform, it is likely to continue relying on that platform in the future.”
He added, “The best response for the United States is not to complain about competition, but to make sure we win in the future. To do that, we need to move quickly and quickly to promote American AI as a superior alternative.” We need to act effectively.”
