Microsoft has finished construction on its first datacenter in the Village of Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, and says the building is fully operational after bringing equipment online and running startup activities in April. The company calls the facility Fairwater. Wisconsin Public Radio puts the site at 315 acres.
Announced in May 2024, the building came in ahead of schedule. Nearly 10,000 construction workers contributed to it over two years, and close to 550 full-time staff now work on site, with Microsoft and its contractors still hiring.
“With our Fairwater datacenter now fully operational, Wisconsin is now home to the world’s most powerful supercomputer,” said Brad Smith, Microsoft's vice chair and president. The announcement attaches no benchmark to that claim, names no methodology and identifies no third party who measured it. It also gives no megawatt figure for the site, no cooling method and no water-use number, so the specifications a facilities engineer would normally use to rank Fairwater against another hyperscale campus are not in the material.
Construction of a second facility immediately next door continues. Current work covers foundation installation, steel erection and underground utility placement, with completion scheduled for 2028. Full-time headcount in the village is expected to reach around 800 once that building is fully operational, and a further expansion to the north would account for hundreds more.
Spending is the firmer number. Microsoft estimates it will have spent $4.7 billion locally on hyperscale construction in Wisconsin between 2024 and 2028, and says it has purchased directly from 29 businesses across 11 Wisconsin counties. Those direct purchases include construction suppliers in Racine County, contractors and steel fabricators in Outagamie and Marathon Counties, electrical equipment manufacturers in Rock and Columbia Counties, and machinery manufacturers in La Crosse County.
More buildings sit in the pipeline behind these two. Wisconsin Public Radio reports that the Mount Pleasant village board approved site plans in January for up to 15 more Microsoft datacenters that could go up over the next decade, and that data center proposals elsewhere in the state have drawn pushback from residents concerned about high energy and water use.
For buyers weighing capacity in the Upper Midwest, Fairwater moves a large block of AI compute out of the construction column and into the operating one, while the 2028 date on the second building marks the earliest point at which the same campus adds more. What the announcement does not settle is the power and cooling envelope, and until a megawatt figure or a utility filing puts numbers on it, engineers comparing this campus against a competing site will be working without the two figures that usually decide the question.
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