Microsoft said on Wednesday it is “slowing or pausing” some of its data center projects, describing the move as a show of flexibility as the artificial intelligence (AI) industry evolves.
“In recent years, demand for our cloud and AI services grew more than we could have ever anticipated and to meet this opportunity, we began executing the largest and most ambitious infrastructure scaling project in our history,” Noelle Walsh, president of Microsoft cloud computing operations, wrote in a Wednesday post on LinkedIn.
“By nature, any significant new endeavor at this size and scale requires agility and refinement as we learn and grow with our customers. What this means is that we are slowing or pausing some early-stage projects,” she said.
The announcement comes as AI companies pour unprecedented amounts of funding into infrastructure to meet the computational and energy demands of the emerging technology.
Microsoft is still on track to spend more than $80 billion on infrastructure, a company spokesperson confirmed.
Still, the company has revealed changes to a variety of its data center plans, including the halt of projects in central Ohio’s Licking County.
A Microsoft spokesperson told The Hill these projects were halted “after careful consideration” and that two of the three sites will be used for farming.
And last December, the company announced it paused a large data center project in Wisconsin as it entered the later phases.
“We plan our datacenter capacity needs years in advance to ensure we have sufficient infrastructure in the right places,” the spokesperson told The Hill. “As AI demand continues to grow, and our datacenter presence continues to expand, the changes we have made demonstrates the flexibility of our strategy.”
The Trump administration has pushed for more data center development to assist in the acceleration of AI technology. These centers house rows of servers that provide the processing capacity for machine learning, cloud storage and AI systems.
Last week, the administration identified 16 sites for data centers on land owned by the Department of Energy, with Secretary Chris Wright describing the “global race for AI dominance” as the “next Manhattan project.”
The department said it hopes operations at the center could begin by the end of 2027.
During his first week at the White House in January, President Trump announced a private sector investment of up to $500 billion to build AI infrastructure.
