Locator: 49410FAIRWATER.
Tag: LDC AI tech MSFT
Performance: ten times greater than current fastest / largest supercomputers in the world.
Overview:
Energy source:
Cost:
From x, link here:
From The WSJ, link here:
From ChatGPT, November 12, 2025:
In broad strokes, the Fairwater project by Microsoft and the Stargate project by OpenAI share key similarities:
- both are major infrastructure initiatives to build large-scale data-centers and AI compute capacity.
- but they are not identical in scope, ownership, purpose and arrangement.
How They Compare And Differ
What they have in common:
- both are about purpose-built AI infrastructure rather than general cloud/data centers
- Fairwater is described as “purpose-built AI datacenters … built to work as one massive AI supercomputer using a single flat networking interconnecting hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs.
- Stargate is described as a huge data‐centre build-out (in the U.S. and beyond) intended to support frontier AI models, massive compute, etc.
- oth involve enormous investment and cutting‐edge hardware (e.g., many thousands of GPUs, novel cooling/architecture).
- For Fairwater: “Hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 GPUs … fiber that could circle the Earth 4.5 times.”
- For Stargate: up to $500 billion invested over the next few years to build AI infrastructure.
- Both see strategic importance in AI compute capability (training large models, inference, etc.)
- Microsoft: “Deliver 10× the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.”
- OpenAI / Stargate: “We are moving with urgency on site assessments … re-imagining how data centres are designed to power advanced AI and make its benefits widely accessible.”
How They Differ
Ownership / Partnership / Purpose
- Fairwater is a Microsoft-led project (within Microsoft’s Azure/AI infrastructure) and its build is part of Microsoft’s own operations and partnerships. For example: “Fairwater … is part of a global network of purpose-built AI datacenters … integrated into Microsoft’s cloud of more than 400 datacenters across 70 regions.”
- Stargate is a separate initiative by OpenAI (with partners such as Oracle, SoftBank Group Corp.) to build massive AI infrastructure and expand compute capacity; Microsoft is a “key initial technology partner” in Stargate but not necessarily the primary owner.
- Scale & Public Commitment
- Stargate’s public figure: up to $500 billion over four years to build new AI infrastructure in the U.S., with targets like 10 gigawatts of compute capacity.
- Fairwater’s public figure: e.g., Microsoft publicly pledged ~$3.3 billion investment in the Wisconsin site.
- So the scale of what OpenAI/Stargate is publicly committing is much larger (or at least ambitiously larger) than what Microsoft has publicly disclosed for Fairwater so far.
- Geographic / System Integration
- Fairwater is being built as a “network” of sites (Wisconsin, Atlanta, etc) interconnected to form “the world’s first planet-scale AI superfactory.”
- Stargate likewise is about multiple large data-centers across the U.S. and beyond. But the emphasis is very heavily on build-out of compute capacity and infrastructure partnerships.
- Primary Use/Customers
- Fairwater appears to serve Microsoft’s AI services (Azure AI, Copilot, etc) and extend its own infrastructure capabilities.
- Stargate is explicitly positioned as part of OpenAI’s infrastructure strategy to underpin its own model training and inference, and changing the compute landscape broadly. For example: “This infrastructure will … secure American leadership in AI … provide … a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.”
ChatGPT also explains the different models: Stargate, Fairwater, and AWS. I won't post that at this time. It becomes overwhelming.
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A Musical Interlude
For the steel guitar.
