Key points
* Azure AI datacenters are being unveiled in Atlanta, Georgia, as part of the Fairwater site, which is connected to the first Fairwater site in Wisconsin and the broader Azure global datacenter footprint.
* The Fairwater datacenter design is a departure from the traditional cloud datacenter model, using a single flat network that can integrate hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs into a massive supercomputer.
* The Azure AI superfactory is the world’s first planet-scale AI superfactory, empowering every person and organization on the planet to achieve more by providing a flexible, fit-for-purpose infrastructure that can serve the full spectrum of modern AI workloads.
Microsoft has announced the unveiling of its next Fairwater site of Azure AI datacenters in Atlanta, Georgia. This purpose-built datacenter is connected to the first Fairwater site in Wisconsin, prior generations of AI supercomputers, and the broader Azure global datacenter footprint to create the world’s first planet-scale AI superfactory. The Fairwater site is designed to efficiently meet unprecedented demand for AI compute, push the frontiers of model intelligence, and empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.
To meet this demand, Microsoft has reinvented how it designs AI datacenters and the systems that run inside them. The Fairwater datacenter design is a departure from the traditional cloud datacenter 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. This innovation is a product of decades of experience designing datacenters and networks, as well as learnings from supporting some of the largest AI training jobs on the planet.
The Fairwater datacenter design is well-suited for training the next generation of frontier models and is built with fungibility in mind. Training has evolved from a single monolithic job into a range of workloads with different requirements, such as pre-training, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and synthetic data generation. Microsoft has deployed a dedicated AI WAN backbone to integrate each Fairwater site into a broader elastic system that enables dynamic allocation of diverse AI workloads and maximizes GPU utilization of the combined system.
One of the key innovations that support Fairwater is the maximum density of compute. Modern AI infrastructure is increasingly constrained by the laws of physics, and the speed of light is now a key bottleneck in the ability to tightly integrate accelerators, compute, and storage with performant latency. Fairwater is designed to maximize the density of compute to minimize latency within and across racks and maximize system performance.
Another innovation is the use of liquid-based cooling, which provides much higher heat transfer and enables the maximization of rack and row-level power. This allows for the packing of compute as densely as possible inside the datacenter. The two-story datacenter building design also helps to drive compute density by minimizing cable lengths and improving latency, bandwidth, reliability, and cost.
The Fairwater datacenter is powered by purpose-built servers, cutting-edge AI accelerators, and novel networking systems. Each Fairwater datacenter runs a single, coherent cluster of interconnected NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, with an advanced network architecture that can scale reliably beyond traditional Clos network limits. This requires innovation across scale-up networking, scale-out networking, and networking protocol.
The Azure AI superfactory is a meaningful departure from the past, where all traffic had to ride the scale-out network regardless of the requirements of the workload. The new Fairwater site in Atlanta represents the next leap in the Azure AI infrastructure and reflects Microsoft’s experience running the largest AI training jobs on the planet. It combines breakthrough innovations in compute density, sustainability, and networking systems to efficiently serve the massive demand for computational power. The Azure AI superfactory provides a flexible, fit-for-purpose infrastructure that can serve the full spectrum of modern AI workloads and empower every person and organization on the planet to achieve more.
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