Microsoft’s new Azure AI data center in Atlanta, Georgia — the second in its Fairwater series — is ushering in a new era of connected AI super clusters that will power what The Register calls “the 100 trillion-parameter models of the near future.” Fairwater Atlanta, which became operative in October, is part of “a new class of data center – one that doesn’t stand alone but joins a dedicated network of sites functioning as an AI superfactory to accelerate AI,” training models “on a scale that has previously been impossible,” according to Microsoft. The new purpose-built data center is connected to the tech giant’s first Fairwater site, located in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin.

The Fairwater concept “is a departure from the traditional cloud data center model and uses a single flat network that can integrate hundreds of thousands of the latest Nvidia GB200 and GB300 GPUs into a massive supercomputer,” explains Microsoft in a blog post.

Fairwater Atlanta shares the same architecture and design as the company’s first Fairwater plant, opened in September in Wisconsin. “These aren’t simply isolated buildings densely packed with sophisticated silicon and cooling techniques that use almost zero water,” Microsoft says in a feature post that explains the Fairwater campuses are networked together — and will eventually connect to others now under construction — via a dedicated high-speed data transfer technology that allows them to work together to complete model training “in just weeks instead of several months.”

The Wall Street Journal writes “Microsoft’s Fairwater network will house hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs and serve customers like OpenAI, Mistral AI and xAI.” The company plans to double its data center footprint over the next two years, “investing over $34 billion in capital expenditures,” WSJ adds.

The Fairwater facilities, including in Wisconsin, will also be used to train and run Microsoft’s own models.

The new Atlanta complex “spans more than 1 million square feet and sits on 85 acres of land, and it’s also the company’s first data center to feature two floors, which means it can squeeze in double the amount of computing infrastructure compared to older facilities,” reports SiliconANGLE.

But it’s the networking that makes the Fairwater facilities “work together as one system” that really sets it apart, The Register explains, noting “Microsoft doesn’t specify what technology it’s using to bridge the roughly 1,000 kilometer distance” between the first two Fairwater centers, but lists options including Cisco, which last month “revealed the Cisco 8223, a 51.2 Tbps router designed to connect AI data centers up to 1,000 kilometers away.” Broadcom indicates its upcoming Jericho 4 hardware will perform comparably.

TechCrunch reports on a Microsoft-backed startup called Veir that is developing energy-efficient superconducting cables “capable of carrying 3 megawatts of low-voltage electricity.”

SiliconANGLE lauds the new facility’s energy efficiency, explaining that “because it recycles virtually all of the water it uses, its consumption is equivalent to that of about 20 U.S. households.”