In fact, Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, and has been actively supporting the company's AI efforts since 2019. Much of the computing power and cloud servers that power ChatGPT come from Microsoft.
In its latest move, Microsoft may be funding the world’s most expensive data center project. It is planning to build a supercomputing facility with OpenAI at a cost of more than $100 billion, with a focus on the Stargate supercomputer.
Tech giant Microsoft is currently looking for a location in the US where it can set up its data center.
Even the largest data centers on Earth cost anywhere from $250 million to several billion dollars. So why is Microsoft's data center worth $100 billion? (Photo: MAXIPHOTO / GETTY IMAGES)
The project will take six years to complete, and will consist of five phases. In the fourth phase, Microsoft plans to develop and launch a supercomputer that is smaller than Stargate, but more powerful than most existing systems. They hope to achieve this feat by 2026, and this supercomputer could be used to support OpenAI's speech recognition or text-to-video AI tools.
In the fifth phase of this data center project, Microsoft and OpenAI will move forward with the development of an advanced AI supercomputer called Stargate, which is expected to be operational by 2028.
Once this project is complete, Microsoft and OpenAI will have enough equipment to train the world's most powerful AI models, including future versions of ChatGPT. " We are always planning for the next generation of infrastructure innovation, which is essential to continue advancing the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI)," said a Microsoft representative.
Experts estimate that all these stages could cost Microsoft a total of about $115 billion, the bulk of which, that is, about $100 billion, will be spent in the fourth and fifth stages.
Conventional data centers don’t cost hundreds of billions of dollars. Even the largest data centers on Earth cost anywhere from $250 million to several billion. So why does Microsoft’s proposed data center cost $100 billion?
This high cost is related to the development of artificial intelligence. Compared to traditional data centers, AI data centers require more power, advanced hardware cooling systems, higher chip counts (possibly millions), as well as larger data processing and cloud storage capabilities.
“ Given that generative AI workloads require more computing power, and also have a broader impact on energy efficiency and cooling in data centers, cloud costs will certainly continue to rise as more companies adopt generative AI,” Tracy Woo, an IT research analyst, told the WSJ. “So don’t be surprised to hear about a future data center costing more than $100 billion .”
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