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Microsoft Spending Billions on Its European AI Footprint
In the past week, Microsoft has committed to spending an additional $5.5 billion over two years to build out its cloud and AI infrastructure in Europe.
Germany is one of the benefactors of Microsoft's European spending spree. According to an announcement last week, Redmond intends to spend $3.4 billion over two years in the country -- a boon to an economy that is expected to remain stagnant for the rest of the year.
Another recipient is Spain. Microsoft has earmarked $2.1 billion over two years to expand its "AI and cloud infrastructure" there, according to a post on X this week by Microsoft President Brad Smith.
Both announcements represent expansions of Microsoft's existing investments in each of these countries. For instance, Microsoft is currently months deep into a new datacenter project located in Aragon, Spain, which will in turn support another Microsoft datacenter region in Madrid.
Likewise, the Germany investment will contribute to Microsoft's existing plan to double its Azure cloud capacity in the country. Microsoft will also use its billions to teach AI skills to over 1 million Germans "by the end of 2025."
"Together with the partner ecosystem, new training programs are being launched that focus on building AI skills, the development AI technical capabilities, supporting AI transformation in enterprises and promoting safe and responsible development of artificial intelligence," Microsoft said in its announcement. "This also includes the first professional certificate for generative AI."
Microsoft recapped its European infrastructure investments in this Wednesday blog post. Those investments include spending on "infrastructure at new and existing datacenters, deploying the most advanced AI accelerators from NVIDIA and AMD, alongside our own custom AI accelerator capabilities, faster networking and storage solutions, and optimized computing infrastructure."
New datacenter regions are in development for the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland and Greece.
"This infrastructure investment will help a need for efficient, scalable, and sustainable AI-specific compute power," said Microsoft, "and the needs of the private and public sector waiting to take advantage of the latest cloud and AI breakthroughs."