Microsoft announced a USD 3.2 billion datacenter capacity expansion plan in Sweden.
Microsoft Corp. will spend 33.7 billion Swedish crowns, or $3.2 billion, to expand its data center capacity in Sweden over two years. This investment builds upon the company's Azure region that was inaugurated three years prior, which comprises three facilities located in the cities of Gävle, Sandviken and Staffanstorp. As part of the expansion effort, Microsoft will deploy 20,000 new graphics processing units to support artificial intelligence workloads. According to Brad Smith during a press conference, the GPUs will be "chips like the Nvidia H100."
The H100 is two generations behind Nvidia Corp.'s flagship data center GPU. Nvidia introduced the H100 in 2022 and debuted a newer, significantly more capable version with a larger memory pool in November 2024. In March 2025, Nvidia introduced an even faster GPU called the Blackwell B200 that can train AI models several times faster. Nevertheless, the H100 continues to be in high demand—Meta Platforms Inc. revealed plans to buy 350,000 units in January 2025, about two months before the Blackwell B200's debut.
Microsoft's chip deployment will not rely exclusively on Nvidia. During the press conference, Smith stated: "You will see us increasingly diversify the chips that we have. We've been public about being very bullish on Nvidia but also AMD and ultimately some of our own chips as well." Microsoft has detailed one internally developed AI chip, the Maia 100, which debuted in November 2024 as one of the largest processors to use a five-nanometer manufacturing node. Data flows through Maia 100 chips via a custom Ethernet-based network protocol that can manage 4.8 terabits of traffic per second per accelerator.
To address the cooling challenges posed by high-performance AI processors, Microsoft developed a custom heat dissipation system for the Maia 100, as its data centers were not originally designed to accommodate the large liquid chillers typically necessary for such deployments. This custom cooling infrastructure may enable installation of the Maia 100 at the Swedish facilities and support future deployments of additional custom chips. Microsoft detailed an internally developed central processing unit, the Cobalt 100, at its Ignite conference in November 2024 and is developing a second-generation Maia accelerator.
Beyond data center expansion, Microsoft will allocate a portion of the $3.2 billion investment to local education initiatives, aiming to provide 250,000 people with access to AI training by 2027. This announcement comes weeks after rival Google LLC revealed a $1.1 billion plan to expand its data center campus in Finland.