Vice Chair and President at Microsoft, Brad Smith, participates in the primary day of Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 12, 2024. The most important technology conference on this planet this 12 months has 71,528 attendees from 153 countries and three,050 corporations, with AI emerging as probably the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franca/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
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Microsoft plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on the development of knowledge centers that may handle artificial intelligence workloads, the corporate said in a Friday blog post.Â
Over half of the expected AI infrastructure spending will happen within the U.S., Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal 12 months ends in June.Â
“Today, america leads the worldwide AI race because of the investment of personal capital and innovations by American corporations of all sizes, from dynamic start-ups to well-established enterprises,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we have seen this firsthand through our partnership with OpenAI, from rising firms resembling Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”
Several top-tier technology corporations are rushing to spend billions on Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running AI models. The fast spread of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, kicked off the AI race for corporations to deliver their very own generative AI capabilities. Having invested greater than $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft provides cloud infrastructure to the startup and has incorporated 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 primary quarter of fiscal 2025. Capital expenditures will increase sequentially within the fiscal second quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in October.
Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha were in search of $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 increased 33% within the fiscal first quarter, with 12 percentage points stemming from AI services.
Smith called on President-elect Donald Trump’s incoming administration to guard the country’s leadership in AI through education and the promotion of U.S. AI technologies abroad.
“China is beginning to offer developing countries subsidized access to scarce chips, and it’s promising to construct local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese properly recognize that if a rustic standardizes on China’s AI platform, it likely will proceed to depend on that platform in the longer term.”
He added, “The perfect response for america will not be to complain concerning the competition but to make sure we win the race ahead. This can require that we move quickly and effectively to advertise American AI as a superior alternative.”
