Microsoft Vice President and President Brad Smith takes part in the first day of the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal on November 12, 2024. The world's largest technology conference this year includes 71,528 participants from 153 countries and 3,050 companies, with emerging artificial intelligence as the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franca/Noor Photo via Getty Images)
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Microsoft The company said in a blog post on Friday that it plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal year 2025 on building data centers that can handle artificial intelligence workloads.
Microsoft vice president and president Brad Smith wrote that more than half of the expected spending on AI infrastructure will take place in the United States. Microsoft's fiscal year 2025 ends in June.
“Today, the United States is leading the global AI race thanks to private capital investment and innovations by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic startups to established corporations,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we've seen this firsthand through our partnership with OpenAI, from startups like Anthropic and xAI, and our AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”
Many high-profile technology companies are rushing to spend billions on it Nvidia GPUs for training and running AI models. The rapid spread of OpenAI's ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, has sparked a race for companies to introduce their own generative AI capabilities. Having invested more than $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft provides the startup's cloud infrastructure and has integrated its models into Windows, Teams, and other products.
Microsoft reported $20 billion in capital expenditures and assets acquired under finance leases worldwide, with $14.9 billion spent on property and equipment, in the first quarter of fiscal 2025. Amy Hood, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said the expenses Capitalism will increase successively in the second fiscal quarter. In October.
Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha were looking for $63.2 billion in additions to property and equipment in fiscal 2025, implying 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 artificial intelligence services.
Smith called on the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to protect the country's leadership in the field of artificial intelligence through education and promotion of American artificial intelligence technologies abroad.
“China has begun giving developing countries subsidized access to rare chips, and is promising to build domestic AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese wisely realize that if a country standardizes a Chinese AI platform, it will likely continue to rely on that platform in the future.”
He added: “The best response for the United States is not to complain about the competition but to ensure that we win the race in front of us. This will require that we move quickly and effectively to promote American artificial intelligence as a superior alternative.”
