Microsoft Going Large On AI & Cloud Computing

Uploaded on 2024-03-15 in TECHNOLOGY-Key Areas-Artificial Intelligence, FREE TO VIEW

Microsoft is making substantial investments in Europe, with a recent multi-billion-dollar announcements in the UK and Germany. Now, the company is also planning significant $2.1 billion spending in Spain to bolster its position in the European Artificial Intelligence (AI) landscape.

The news came as Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez took to X to announce Microsoft’s decision to quadruple its investment in the country. Microsoft has chosen Spain as the base of operations for its new R&D hub specialised in the application of AI technologies to improve user experience on the web.

This facility will be one of eight research centres worldwide and part of Microsoft’s WebXT (Web Experiences Team) division, an organisation of more than 5k people focused on the development of advanced user experiences that leverage AI and Deep Learning Technologies.

Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, met with President of the Spanish government, to present what is the company's largest investment in Spain in its 37 years of operating there and has recently spoken of plans to invest £3.2 billion in Germany on AI and data centre infrastructure.

Microsoft has over 60 data centres across the globe, more than any other cloud provider. Each Azure geography contains one or more regions and meets specific data residency and compliance requirements. This lets them keep their business-critical data and apps nearby on fault-tolerant, high-capacity networking infrastructure.

As part of the Spanish move, Microsoft will open a data centres cloud region located in Madrid, and plans to open another data centre in Aragon that will serve European companies and public bodies. Across both these two sites, Microsoft said it will provide its entire range of AI offerings to Spanish and European companies.

The data centres in Spain could add €8.4bn to Spanish GDP and contribute to the creation of 69,000 jobs in the period up to 2030.

Microsoft said it will work with the Spanish government on responsible AI and support industry and government cyber security and this will include working with the Spanish National Cybersecurity Institute and offering access to telemetry and information on potential threats and cyber attacks. Microsoft will share its responsible AI design standards, implementation guides, and additional documentation on best practices in this area with the Spanish Agency for the Supervision of Artificial Intelligence (AESIA).

Microsoft plans to expand its data centres for cloud and AI applications and train more than 1.2 million people in digital skills by the end of 2025. Over the next two years, the company will expand its cloud region in Frankfurt am Main and its newly planned infrastructure in North Rhine-Westphalia.

In November 2023, Microsoft announced it will more than double its data centre footprint in the UK, with plans to spend £2.5 billion over the next three years and bring 20,000 of the “most advanced” GPUs to the UK by 2026.

Worldwide cloud computing spending is expected to top $1.3tn by 2027and Microsoft’s Azure accounts for about a quarter of cloud infrastructure spending, according to Canalys. That means building a lot of data centres to keep up with demand, especially if the AI boom continues. According to Gartner, by 2028, half of multi-nationals will have a digital sovereignty strategy, up from just 10% now.

That means having data centres wherever the customers are, because they will increasingly want to keep their data close.

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