Microsoft Vice President and President Brad Smith attends the first day of the Web Summit in Lisbon, Portugal, November 12, 2024. The world’s largest technology conference this year has 71,528 attendees from 153 countries and 3,050 companies, with AI emerging as the most represented industry. (Photo by Rita Franco/NurPhoto via Getty Images)
Nurphoto | Nurphoto | Getty Images
Microsoft expects to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 to build data centers that can handle artificial intelligence workloads, the company said in a blog post Friday.
More than half of Microsoft’s $80 billion spending will be in the US, Microsoft vice president and president Brad Smith wrote. Microsoft’s fiscal year 2025 ends in June.
“Today, the United States leads the global AI race thanks to private capital investment and innovation by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic start-ups to well-established enterprises,” Smith said. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this firsthand through our partnership with OpenAI, from emerging companies like Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-enabled software platforms and applications.”
Several top tech companies are rushing to spend billions on Nvidia graphics processing units for training and running AI models. The rapid expansion of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, has set off an AI race for companies to deliver their own generative AI capabilities.
Microsoft reported capital expenditures and assets acquired under finance leases of $20 billion in the first quarter of fiscal 2025, with $14.9 billion spent on property and equipment. Capital spending will increase sequentially in the second fiscal quarter, Microsoft Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood said in October.
WATCH: Microsoft will end 2024 with capital expenditures of at least $53 billion
