On March 30, investment bank TD Cowen released a report saying that Microsoft has canceled multiple data center construction projects involving 2GW of electricity in North America and Europe. There are currently two interpretations of the news. The first is that Microsoft believes that there are too many server clusters currently used for AI; the second is that the corresponding data center "plans cannot keep up with changes", that is, the design of the facilities themselves may no longer be able to bear the high requirements of the new generation of high-end AI computing servers for power and cooling.
Bloomberg said that in January this year, Microsoft and OpenAI adjusted their partnership, allowing OpenAI to use third-party cloud services to train its own models in certain situations. At the same time, in February this year, there was news that Microsoft had canceled some data center capacity leases in the United States. Now Microsoft has revealed that it has canceled a batch of data center projects, and the media believes that the current global server clusters used for AI may be in oversupply.
The Register has another interpretation of Microsoft's move. They believe that Microsoft's existing data center configuration may no longer be able to meet the cooling and power requirements of the latest or future GPUs and large server clusters. Microsoft canceled the current data center construction plan in order to build more and better data centers.
In response, Microsoft said in a statement provided to the two media that the company's commitment to invest $80 billion (IT Home Note: the current exchange rate is approximately RMB 581.476 billion) in AI infrastructure in fiscal year 2025 (ending at the end of June this year) has not changed, and it is "fully capable of meeting existing and growing customer needs." Although the company will make strategic adjustments in some markets, the corresponding adjustments are aimed at "shifting resources to future growth areas," and Microsoft's investment in all markets will continue to grow strongly.