Over the past few years, we have driven remarkable progress accelerating AI innovation together with our customers and partners. We are achieving efficiency and productivity at scale to shape industries and markets around the world. It is time to demand more of AI to solve humanity’s biggest challenges by democratizing intelligence, obsolescing the mundane and unlocking creativity. This is the notion of becoming Frontier: to empower human ambition and find AI-first differentiation in everything we do to maximize an organization’s potential and our impact on society.

Microsoft’s technology portfolio ensures our customers can go further with AI on their way to becoming Frontier firms, using our AI Transformation success framework as their guide. Our AI business solutions are dramatically changing how people gain actionable insights from data — fusing the capabilities of AI agents and Copilots while keeping humans at the center. We have the largest, most scalable, most capable cloud and AI platform in the industry for our customers to build upon their aspirations. We remain deeply focused on ensuring AI is used responsibly and securely, and embed security into everything we do to help our customers prioritize cybersecurity and guard against threats.

We are fortunate to work with thousands of customers and partners around the world — across every geography and industry. I am pleased to share some of the customer stories being showcased at our recently opened Experience Center One facility — each exemplifying the path to becoming Frontier.

Driven by a commitment to innovation, sustainability and operational excellence, ADNOC is helping meet the world’s growing energy demands safely and reliably, while accelerating decarbonization efforts. To empower its workforce, the company introduced OneTalent — a unified AI-powered platform consolidating over 16 legacy HR processes into a single, intelligent system that furthers its dedication to nurturing talent, aligning people with strategic goals and turning every member of its workforce into an AI collaborator. Partnering with Microsoft and AIQ, ADNOC applied AI across its operations to reimagine everything from seismic analysis to predictive maintenance. ENERGYai and Neuron 5 — AI-powered platforms built natively on Azure OpenAI — turn complexity into actionable insights. The platforms use predictive models to reduce downtime — by as much as 50% at one plant. They are also using autonomous agents to optimize energy use; unlocking data-driven insights that have accelerated energy workflows from months or years to just days or minutes.

Asset manager and technology provider BlackRock has been on a journey to infuse AI to level up how its organization operates across three key pillars: how they invest, how they operate and how they serve clients. To accelerate this mission, they partnered with Microsoft to transform processes across the investment management lifecycle by integrating cloud and AI technologies alongside its Aladdin platform. Embedded across 20 applications and accessed by tens of thousands of users, the Aladdin platform’s AI capabilities deliver functionally relevant tools to help redefine workflows for different types of financial service professionals. Client relationship managers are saving hours per client, reducing duplication and improving accuracy by evaluating CRM and market data to generate personalized client briefs and opportunity analyses using natural language processing — supported by verification and review methods that facilitate accuracy and compliance. Investment compliance officers are streamlining portfolio onboarding and compliance guideline coding, saving time on more straightforward tasks to focus on complex, investigative tasks. Portfolio managers can access data, analytics, research summaries, cash balances and more through AI-powered chat capabilities; enabling faster, more informed decision-making aligned with client mandates. With accelerated insights, improved data quality and enhanced risk management, BlackRock and its clients gain an advantage while enhancing client service, compliance and portfolio management.

To build on its culture of innovation and enable hyper-relevant messaging at scale, multinational advertising and media agency dentsu built a cutting-edge solution using Azure OpenAI: dentsu.Connect — a unified OS for its applications. By leveraging the power of AI across the entire campaign lifecycle, clients can build and execute campaigns while predicting marketers’ next best impact with confidence and precision. This end-to-end platform drives data connectivity and ensures seamless interoperability with clients’ technology and data stacks to maximize and drive brand relevance across content, production and media activation while aligning every action with business goals. dentsu.Connect helps minimize the gap between insights and action with speed and precision. Since launching, users have increased operational efficiency by 25%, improved business outcomes by 30% and quickened decision-making and data-driven AI insight generation by 125X.

Water management solutions and services partner Ecolab is harnessing the power of data-driven solutions to enable organizations to reduce water consumption, maximize system performance and optimize operating costs. Using Microsoft Azure and IoT services, the company built ECOLAB3D: an intelligent cloud platform that unifies diverse and dispersed IoT data to visualize and optimize water systems remotely. By providing actionable insights for real-time optimization across multiple assets and sites, Ecolab partners with global leaders such as Microsoft to collectively drive hundreds of millions in operational savings — while conserving more than 226 billion gallons of water annually; equivalent to the drinking water needs of nearly 800 million people. Delivering solutions across diverse industries, Ecolab is also a trusted partner for foodservice locations, helping balance labor costs with customer satisfaction. Its cloud-based platform Ecolab RushReady transforms data into an AI-enabled dashboard that improves daily operations by delivering actionable insights. In an Ecolab customer case study, this helped improve speed of service and sales labor per hour, resulting in increased profit of more than 10%. From data centers to dining rooms, Ecolab delivers intelligent, scalable solutions that transform operations for greater efficiency and measurable impact.

Leveraging Microsoft’s AI solutions across its portfolio, Epic built agentic “personas” to support care teams and patients, improve operations and financial performance and advance the practice of medicine. By summarizing patient records and automatically drafting clinical notes, one organization found that “Art” decreased after-hours documentation for clinicians by 60%, reduced burnout by 82% and helped them focus more on patient care. Care teams can also track long-term patient health and better plan treatment for chronic conditions, while nurses can perform wound image analysis automatically with 72% greater precision than manual methods. At one hospital, AI review of routine chest X-rays led to earlier discovery of over 100 cases of lung cancer, increasing the detection rate to 70% compared to the 27% national average. To support back-end operations, organizations are using “Penny” to improve the revenue cycle — resulting in $3.4 million in additional revenue at one regional network services provider. Epic also developed “Emmie” to have conversational interactions with patients and more easily help them schedule appointments and ask questions. Epic is leveraging Azure Fabric for the Cosmos platform to bring together anonymized data from more than 300 million patients, including 13 million with rare diseases, so physicians can connect with peers who have treated similar cases to improve rare disease diagnosis and select the most effective treatment.

To reduce professional burnout and accelerate scale across the industry, Harvey built an AI platform to automate legal research, contract reviews and document analysis. Harvey Assistant assists attorney searches across large document sets to identify specific clauses or provisions within seconds instead of hours. To support large-scale analysis, Harvey Vault manages and analyzes up to 100,000 files per project for complex tasks like litigation, while Harvey Workflows automates routine yet critical tasks into smaller AI-managed steps. With the integration of the newly expanded Microsoft Word add-in, AI capabilities provide legal teams with the ability to edit 100-plus page documents with a single query, enabling centrally controlled document compliance reviews that enhance efficiency while reducing risk. With more than 74,000 legal professionals using the platform, Harvey is helping them streamline workflows, reduce administrative burden and combat attorney fatigue — with the average user saving up to 25 hours of time per month.

To revolutionize drug discovery, biotech company Insilico Medicine is leveraging AI across its entire development pipeline — from target identification to molecule design and clinical trials. The company created Pharma.AI to accelerate research while reducing costs and improving success rates in emerging novel therapies — with developmental candidate timelines reduced from 2.5-4.5 years to 9-18 months for more than 20 therapeutic programs. The integrated AI platforms built with Azure AI Foundry manage complex biological data, identify disease-relevant targets and advance candidates to clinical trials — accelerating research in what is traditionally a slow, costly and complex pharmaceutical R&D process. They enable researchers to analyze genetic data and identify drug targets with AI-generated reports to facilitate business case development; use physics-based models to evaluate candidates for potency, safety and synthesizability; integrate with specialized large language models for drug discovery; and combine AI agents with structured workflows to reduce document drafting time by over 85% while improving first-pass quality of scientific documents by 60%.

To enhance manufacturing operations in a fast-paced and complex industry, global consumer foods producer Kraft Heinz partnered with Microsoft to embed AI and machine learning across its production facilities, resulting in smarter decision-making and operational improvements. The company built an AI-powered platform — Plant Chat — providing real-time insights on the factory floor and reducing downtime to enable faster, more confident decision-making with proactive guidance. The solution analyzes over 300 variables and allows operators to interact via natural language to improve consistency, reduce guesswork, decrease waste and maintain compliance — even for less experienced operators. Since implementation and collectively with other initiatives, these efforts have resulted in a 40% reduction in supply-chain waste, a 20% increase in sales forecast accuracy and a 6% product-yield improvement across all North American manufacturing sites through the third quarter of 2024. Combined with further operational improvements, this work has yielded more than $1.1 billion in gross efficiencies from 2023 through the third quarter of 2024.

To redefine work and scale intelligent automation globally, digital native Manus AI developed an advanced autonomous AI system designed to understand user intent and execute complex workflows independently across various domains. The solution leverages a multi-agent architecture through Microsoft Azure AI Foundry to deliver scalable, versatile task automation for millions of users worldwide. Its Wide Research capability deploys specialized sub-agents to rapidly perform large-scale, multi-dimensional research tasks; saving significant time and delivering actionable insights to make complex analysis accessible and efficient for strategic decision-making. Manus AI can also build dynamic dashboards so organizations can visualize trends, anomalies and market insights in real-time; driving strategic planning with reliable, up-to-date information. The multimodel image editing and creation capabilities also allow users to support brand consistency and enable marketers and product teams to iterate rapidly.

To advance automotive innovation, stabilize supply chain volatility, simplify production complexity and meet sustainability demands, Mercedes-Benz scaled AI innovation across its global production network. The MO360 data platform connects over 30 car plants worldwide to the Microsoft Cloud, enabling real-time data access, global optimization and analytics. The Digital Factory Chatbot Ecosystem uses a multi-agent system to empower employees with collaborative insights, and Paint Shop AI leverages machine learning simulations to diagnose efficiency declines and reduce energy consumption of the buildings and machines — including 20% energy savings in the Rastatt paint shop. Using NVIDIA Omniverse on Azure, Mercedes-Benz created large-scale factory digital twins for visualization, testing and optimization of production lines — enabling agile planning and continuous improvement. The MBUX Virtual Assistant embedded in over 3 million vehicles, powered by Microsoft’s ChatGPT and Bing Search, offers natural, conversational voice interactions and integrates Microsoft 365 Copilot with Teams directly into vehicles to enable mobile workspaces.

U.S. stock exchange and financial services technology company Nasdaq integrated AI capabilities into its Nasdaq Boardvantage platform to help corporate governance teams and board members save time, reduce information overload, improve decision-making and enhance board meeting preparation and governance workflows. The board management platform is used by leadership teams at over 4,000 organizations worldwide to centralize activities like meeting planning, agenda building, decision support, resolution approval, voting and signatures. Using Azure OpenAI GPT-4o mini, the AI Summarization feature helps board secretaries significantly reduce manual effort, saving hundreds of hours annually with accuracy between 91% to 97%. AI Meeting Minutes helps governance teams draft minutes by processing agendas, documents and notes while allowing for customization of length, tone and anonymization; accelerating post-meeting workflows and saving up to five hours per meeting.

As customers seek to use AI more to shop and search for products, luxury lifestyle company Ralph Lauren developed a personal, frictionless, inspirational and accessible solution to blend fashion with cutting-edge AI. Working with Microsoft, Ralph Lauren developed Ask Ralph: an AI-powered conversational tool providing styling tips and outfit recommendations from across the Polo Ralph Lauren brand. Powered by Azure OpenAI, the AI tool uses a natural language search engine to adapt dynamically to specific language inputs and interpret user intent to improve accuracy. It supports complex queries with exploratory or nuanced information needs with contextual understanding; and can discern tone, satisfaction and intent to refine recommendations. The tool also picks up on cues like location-based insights or event-driven needs. With Ask Ralph, customers can now reimagine how they shop online by putting the brand’s unique and iconic take on style right into their own hands.

Industrial automation and digital transformation expert Rockwell Automation is integrating AI and advanced analytics into its products to help manufacturers adapt seamlessly to market changes, reduce risk and develop agentic AI capabilities to support innovation and growth. FactoryTalk Design Studio Copilot, a cloud-based environment for programming, enables rapid updates to code for evolving production needs — reducing complex coding tasks from days to minutes. Rockwell’s digital twin software, Emulate3D®, creates physics-based models for virtual testing of automation code and AI, reducing costly real-world errors and production risks while cutting on-site commissioning times by 50%. With the integration of NVIDIA Omniverse — a collaborative, large-scale digital twin platform — users can perform multi-user factory design and testing to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration, address industry challenges and unlock opportunities through digital simulation before real-world deployment.

To enable a cleaner, more resilient energy future, Schneider Electric is powering AI-driven industry innovation by addressing grid stability and enterprise sustainability challenges. Built using Microsoft Azure, the company developed solutions for organizations to act faster and smarter while delivering measurable improvements in grid reliability and enterprise ESG management. Resource Advisor Copilot transforms raw ESG and energy data into actionable insights via natural language queries to support knowledge-based and system data questions; saving sustainability managers hundreds of hours annually in data analysis and reporting tasks in early testing. Grid AI Assistant allows operators to interact with complex grids using natural language to improve response times and accuracy during critical events; reducing outages by 40% and speeding up application deployment by 60%. Schneider Electric’s integration of AI tools reflects a strategic approach to digitally transforming energy management, addressing both operational resilience and sustainability imperatives.

To enhance personalized learning, streamline operations and support educators with innovative technology, the State of São Paulo’s Department of Education (SEDUC) partnered with Microsoft to equip schools with cloud and AI solutions — including Azure OpenAI, Microsoft 365, Azure and Dynamics 365. SEDUC is applying responsible AI solutions at scale to address sector priorities like delivering timely, high-quality formative feedback and reducing repetitive administrative work. With Essay Grader, teachers automate portions of grading and receive suggested feedback, freeing time for lesson design and individual support. With Question Grader, students can answer questions more openly with their own perspectives and reasoning while still receiving curated feedback typically reserved for extensive exams. By leveraging these AI-powered solutions, SEDUC is improving learning outcomes, boosting efficiency and strengthening teacher impact — anchored in equity, transparency and sound governance.

Australia’s leading telecommunications company, Telstra, is transforming its customer service operations to improve the experience for its customers and the people that serve them. One of the biggest pain points for teams is navigating multiple systems to identify and resolve a customer issue — leading to long handling times and reliance on how team members interpret various data sources. By leveraging AI solutions built on Azure OpenAI and Microsoft 365 Copilot, the company is enabling instant knowledge access and streamlined workflows. With One Sentence Summary, agents have a concise overview of customer interactions to improve efficiency and customer satisfaction — reducing call handling time by over one minute and repeat contacts by nearly 10%. Ask Telstra provides AI-generated responses from Telstra’s knowledge base in near real-time to assist agents with accurate product, plan and troubleshooting information across a wide variety of topics during calls; facilitating seamless agent-customer interactions with AI assistance.

As one of the largest leading global automakers, Toyota is pioneering AI intelligence in manufacturing with O-beya System: a multi-agent AI system simulating expert discussions virtually. Based on decades of engineering knowledge, the solution fosters a collaborative project management approach to enhance problem-solving and innovation in vehicle development while identifying key challenges to help analyze and diagnose problems. O-beya can auto-select AI agents in fields like fuel efficiency, drivability, noise and vibration, energy management and power management to pinpoint causes and suggest solutions. The system also offers interactive features; including prompt history, term explanations and creative summaries to further enable engineers to explore and validate mitigation strategies efficiently. The system leverages Microsoft Azure OpenAI, Azure AI Search and Azure Cosmos DB to analyze internal design data and help Toyota accelerate innovation, preserve institutional knowledge and resolve complex engineering issues faster. Since January 2024, over 800 powertrain engineers have accessed the system, utilizing it hundreds of times monthly across multiple business units.

As we seek to help our customers realize their AI ambitions, our mission remains unchanged: to empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. We are at our best as a company when we put our technology to work for others. As you move forward on your AI journey, ask what AI can do for your organization and what it means to demand more from it. Leveraging the Microsoft portfolio, together we can do more to positively impact society; going beyond efficiency and productivity to solve for humanity’s biggest challenges. I look forward to partnering with you on your path to becoming Frontier.

The post Becoming Frontier: How human ambition and AI-first differentiation are helping Microsoft customers go further with AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Over the past few years, we have driven remarkable progress accelerating AI innovation together with our customers and partners. We are achieving efficiency and productivity at scale to shape industries and markets around the world. It is time to demand more of AI to solve humanity’s biggest challenges by democratizing intelligence, obsolescing the mundane and…
The post Becoming Frontier: How human ambition and AI-first differentiation are helping Microsoft customers go further with AI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning.

We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift, one that requires us to both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier and executing flawlessly across both.

History shows that general purpose technologies like AI drive step changes in productivity and GDP growth, and we have a unique opportunity to help our customers and the world realize this promise.

Our success depends on enabling commercial and public sector customers and partners to combine their human capital with new AI capabilities to change the frontier of how they operate. To accelerate this, we will increasingly need to bring together sales, marketing, operations, and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice for AI transformation.

With this context, I have asked Judson Althoff to take on an expanded role as CEO of our commercial business. Over the past nine years, Judson has led our global sales organization and was the architect behind designing and building Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) into what it is today: the “number one seed” in the industry and our company’s most important growth engine.

Takeshi Numoto and his marketing team will join this new organization, with Takeshi reporting directly to Judson as CMO, while also continuing to report directly to me on all-up business models, planning, consumer marketing, and corporate brand and communications.

Our operations organization will also move to report to Judson. By bringing operations into the commercial business, we can tighten the feedback loop between what customers need and how we deliver and support them. Carolina Dybeck Happe will continue to report to me, as she works on our overall company transformation and continues to closely partner with Judson.

Additionally, Judson will lead a new commercial leadership team that brings together leaders from engineering, sales, marketing, operations, and finance to drive our product strategy and governance, GTM readiness, and sales motions with shared accountability for the rigor and executional excellence our customers expect.

This will also allow our engineering leaders and me to be laser focused on our highest ambition technical work—across our datacenter buildout, systems architecture, AI science, and product innovation—to lead with intensity and pace in this generational platform shift. Each one of us needs to be at our very best in terms of rapidly learning new skills, adopting new ways to work, and staying close to the metal to drive innovation across the entire stack!!

This isn’t just evolution, it’s reinvention, for each of us professionally and for Microsoft.

Satya

The post Accelerating our commercial growth appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, shared the below communication with Microsoft employees this morning. We are in the midst of a tectonic AI platform shift, one that requires us to both manage and grow our at-scale commercial business today, while building the new frontier and executing flawlessly across both. History shows that general purpose technologies…
The post Accelerating our commercial growth appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

This week we have introduced a wave of purpose-built datacenters and infrastructure investments we are making around the world to support the global adoption of cutting-edge AI workloads and cloud services.

Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to our Fairwater datacenter in Wisconsin, we also have multiple identical Fairwater datacenters under construction in other locations across the US.

In Narvik, Norway, Microsoft announced plans with nScale and Aker JV to develop a new hyperscale AI datacenter.

In Loughton, UK, we announced a partnership with nScale to build the UK’s largest supercomputer to support services in the UK.

These AI datacenters are significant capital projects, representing tens of billions of dollars of investments and hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge AI chips, and will seamlessly connect with our global Microsoft Cloud of over 400 datacenters in 70 regions around the world. Through innovation that can enable us to link these AI datacenters in a distributed network, we multiply the efficiency and compute in an exponential way to further democratize access to AI services globally.

So what is an AI datacenter?

The AI datacenter: the new factory of the AI era

An AI datacenter is a unique, purpose-built facility designed specifically for AI training as well as running large-scale artificial intelligence models and applications. Microsoft’s AI datacenters power OpenAI, Microsoft AI, our Copilot capabilities and many more leading AI workloads.

The new Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin stands as a remarkable feat of engineering, covering 315 acres and housing three massive buildings with a combined 1.2 million square feet under roofs. Constructing this facility required 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable and 72.6 miles of mechanical piping.

Unlike typical cloud datacenters, which are optimized to run many smaller, independent workloads such as hosting websites, email or business applications, this datacenter is built to work as one massive AI supercomputer using a single flat networking interconnecting hundreds of thousands of the latest NVIDIA GPUs. In fact, it will deliver 10X the performance of the world’s fastest supercomputer today, enabling AI training and inference workloads at a level never before seen.

The role of our AI datacenters – powering frontier AI

Effective AI models rely on thousands of computers working together, powered by GPUs, or specialized AI accelerators, to process massive concurrent mathematical computations. They’re interconnected with extremely fast networks so they can share results instantly, and all of this is supported by enormous storage systems that hold the data (like text, images or video) broken down into tokens, the small units of information the AI learns from. The goal is to keep these chips busy all the time, because if the data or the network can’t keep up, everything slows down.

The AI training itself is a cycle: the AI processes tokens in sequence, makes predictions about the next one, checks them against the right answers and adjusts itself. This repeats trillions of times until the system gets better at whatever it’s being trained to do. Think of it like a professional football team’s practice. Each GPU is a player running a drill, the tokens are the plays being executed step by step, and the network is the coaching staff, shouting instructions and keeping everyone in sync. The team repeats plays over and over, correcting mistakes until they can execute them perfectly. By the end, the AI model, like the team, has mastered its strategy and is ready to perform under real game conditions.

AI infrastructure at frontier scale

Purpose-built infrastructure is critical to being able to power AI efficiently. To compute the token math at this trillion-parameter scale of leading AI models, the core of the AI datacenter is made up of dedicated AI accelerators (such as GPUs) mounted on server boards alongside CPUs, memory and storage. A single server hosts multiple GPU accelerators, connected for high-bandwidth communication. These servers are then installed into a rack, with top-of-rack (ToR) switches providing low-latency networking between them. Every rack in the datacenter is interconnected, creating a tightly coupled cluster. From the outside, this architecture looks like many independent servers, but at scale it functions as a single supercomputer where hundreds of thousands of accelerators can train a single model in parallel.

This datacenter runs a single, massive cluster of interconnected NVIDIA GB200 servers and millions of compute cores and exabytes of storage, all engineered for the most demanding AI workloads. Azure was the first cloud provider to bring online the NVIDIA GB200 server, rack and full datacenter clusters. Each rack packs 72 NVIDIA Blackwell GPUs, tied together in a single NVLink domain that delivers 1.8 terabytes of GPU-to-GPU bandwidth and gives every GPU access to 14 terabytes of pooled memory. Rather than behaving like dozens of separate chips, the rack operates as a single, giant accelerator, capable of processing an astonishing 865,000 tokens per second, the highest throughput of any cloud platform available today. The Norway and UK AI datacenters will use similar clusters, and take advantage of NVIDIAs next AI chip design (GB300) which offers even more pooled memory per rack.

The challenge in establishing supercomputing scale, particularly as AI training requirements continue to require breakthrough scales of computing, is getting the networking topology just right. To ensure low latency communication across multiple layers in a cloud environment, Microsoft needed to extend performance beyond a single rack. For the latest NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 deployments globally, at the rack level these GPUs communicate over NVLink and NVSwitch at terabytes per second, collapsing memory and bandwidth barriers. Then to connect across multiple racks into a pod, Azure uses both InfiniBand and Ethernet fabrics that deliver 800 Gbps, in a full fat tree non-blocking architecture to ensure that every GPU can talk to every other GPU at full line rate without congestion. And across the datacenter, multiple pods of racks are interconnected to reduce hop counts and enable tens of thousands of GPUs to function as one global-scale supercomputer.

When laid out in a traditional datacenter hallway, physical distance between racks introduces latency into the system. To address this, the racks in the Wisconsin AI datacenter are laid out in a two-story datacenter configuration, so in addition to racks networked to adjacent racks, they are networked to additional racks above or below them.

This layered approach sets Azure apart. Microsoft Azure was not just the first cloud to bring GB200 online at rack and datacenter scale; we’re doing it at massive scale with customers today. By co-engineering the full stack with the best from our industry partners coupled with our own purpose-built systems, Microsoft has built the most powerful, tightly coupled AI supercomputer in the world, purpose-built for frontier models.

Addressing the environmental impact: closed loop liquid cooling at facility scale

Traditional air cooling can’t handle the density of modern AI hardware. Our datacenters use advanced liquid cooling systems — integrated pipes circulate cold liquid directly into servers, extracting heat efficiently. The closed-loop recirculation ensures zero water waste, with water only needed to fill up once and then it is continually reused.

By designing purpose-built AI datacenters, we were able to build liquid cooling infrastructure into the facility directly to get us more rack-density in the datacenter. Fairwater is supported by the second largest water-cooled chiller plant on the planet and will continuously circulate water in its closed loop cooling system. The hot water is then piped out to the cooling “fins” on each side of the datacenter, where 172 20-foot fans chill and recirculate the water back to the datacenter. This system keeps the AI datacenter running efficiently, even at peak loads.

Over 90% of our datacenter capacity uses this system, requiring water only once during construction and continually reusing it with no evaporation losses. The remaining 10% of traditional servers use outdoor air for cooling, switching to water only during the hottest days, a design that dramatically reduces water usage compared to traditional datacenters.

We’re also using liquid cooling to support AI workloads in many of our existing datacenters; this liquid cooling is accomplished with Heat Exchanger Units (HXUs) that also operate with zero-operational water use.

Storage and compute: Built for AI velocity

Modern datacenters can contain exabytes of storage and millions of CPU compute scores. To support the AI infrastructure cluster, an entirely separate datacenter infrastructure is needed to store and process the data used and generated by the AI cluster. To give you an example of the scale — the Wisconsin AI datacenter’s storage systems are five football fields in length!

We reengineered Azure storage for the most demanding AI workloads, across these massive datacenter deployments for true supercomputing scale. Each Azure Blob Storage account can sustain over 2 million read/write transactions per second, and with millions of accounts available, we can elastically scale to meet virtually any data requirement.

Behind this capability is a fundamentally rearchitected storage foundation that aggregates capacity and bandwidth across thousands of storage nodes and hundreds of thousands of drives. This enables scale to exabyte scale storage, eliminating the need for manual sharding and simplifying operations for even the largest AI and analytics workloads.

Key innovations such as BlobFuse2 deliver high-throughput, low-latency access for GPU node-local training, ensuring that compute resources are never idle and that massive AI training datasets are always available when needed. Multiprotocol support allows seamless integration with diverse data pipelines, while deep integration with analytics engines and AI tools accelerates data preparation and deployment.

Automatic scaling dynamically allocates resources as demand grows, combined with advanced security, resiliency and cost-effective tiered storage, Azure’s storage platform sets the pace for next-generation workloads, delivering the performance, scalability and reliability required.

AI WAN: Connecting multiple datacenters for an even larger AI supercomputer

These new AI datacenters are part of a global network of Azure AI datacenters, interconnected via our Wide Area Network (WAN). This isn’t just about one building, it’s about a distributed, resilient and scalable system that operates as a single, powerful AI machine. Our AI WAN is built with growth capabilities in AI-native bandwidth scales to enable large-scale distributed training across multiple, geographically diverse Azure regions, thus allowing customers to harness the power of a giant AI supercomputer.

This is a fundamental shift in how we think about AI supercomputers. Instead of being limited by the walls of a single facility, we’re building a distributed system where compute, storage and networking resources are seamlessly pooled and orchestrated across datacenter regions. This means greater resiliency, scalability and flexibility for customers.

Bringing it all together

To meet the critical needs of the largest AI challenges, we needed to redesign every layer of our cloud infrastructure stack. This isn’t just about isolated breakthroughs, but composing multiple new approaches across silicon, servers, networks and datacenters, leading to advancements where software and hardware are optimized as one purpose-built system.

Microsoft’s Wisconsin datacenter will play a critical role in the future of AI, built on real technology, real investment and real community impact. As we connect this facility with other regional datacenters, and as every layer of our infrastructure is harmonized as a complete system, we’re unleashing a new era of cloud-powered intelligence, secure, adaptive and ready for what’s next.

To learn more about Microsoft’s datacenter innovations, check out the virtual datacenter tour at datacenters.microsoft.com.

Scott Guthrie is responsible for hyperscale cloud computing solutions and services including Azure, Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, generative AI solutions, data platforms and information and cybersecurity. These platforms and services help organizations worldwide solve urgent challenges and drive long-term transformation.

The post Inside the world’s most powerful AI datacenter appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

This week we have introduced a wave of purpose-built datacenters and infrastructure investments we are making around the world to support the global adoption of cutting-edge AI workloads and cloud services. Today in Wisconsin we introduced Fairwater, our newest US AI datacenter, the largest and most sophisticated AI factory we’ve built yet. In addition to…
The post Inside the world’s most powerful AI datacenter appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership. We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement. Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety.

The post A joint statement from Microsoft and OpenAI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Microsoft and OpenAI have signed a non-binding memorandum of understanding (MOU) for the next phase of our partnership. We are actively working to finalize contractual terms in a definitive agreement. Together, we remain focused on delivering the best AI tools for everyone, grounded in our shared commitment to safety.
The post A joint statement from Microsoft and OpenAI appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

Today, Microsoft and the US General Services Administration (GSA) announced a comprehensive agreement to bring a suite of productivity, cloud and AI services, including Microsoft 365 Copilot at no cost for up to 12 months for millions of existing Microsoft G5 users, to help agencies rapidly adopt secure and compliant advanced AI tools that will enhance operations, strengthen security and accelerate innovation for the American people. As an unparalleled milestone in advancing GSA’s OneGov strategy, Microsoft’s offerings will be available through a governmentwide unified pricing strategy that is expected to drive $3 billion in cost savings in the first year alone.

Enabling AI innovation and acceleration for federal agencies

This expansive offering will help agencies achieve key pillars of the America’s AI Action Plan by enabling federal agencies to serve at the forefront on driving AI innovation and adoption in service to the American people. Through this agreement federal agencies will access the latest AI capabilities at scale, now integrated in many of the products they already use, to achieve key administration priorities:

• Transforming productivity with AI: A unique Microsoft 365 and Copilot suite, offered exclusively to the federal government, enables agencies to automate workflows, analyze data and collaborate more efficiently, freeing public servants to focus on their core mission.
• Driving automation with AI agents: With AI agents, and no per-agent fees, agencies can build solutions for citizen inquiries, case management and contact centers, extending the reach and responsiveness of government services.
• Accelerating cloud modernization: With significant Azure discounts and the waiving of data egress fees, agencies can modernize infrastructure, reduce barriers to interagency collaboration and unlock the full power of advanced analytics and AI.
• Streamlining government operations: Dynamics 365 applications help agencies enhance citizen service, optimize supply chains and increase field responsiveness, directly impacting everyday public outcomes.
• Strengthening security across all levels: Integrated platforms such as Microsoft Entra ID and Sentinel provide advanced identity and threat protection, supporting the Zero Trust journey across federal environments.

Federal agencies can opt-in to any or all of these offers through September 2026, with discounted pricing available for up to 36 months.

Innovation meets security

Agencies can quickly adopt these solutions knowing these services have already achieved key FedRAMP security and compliance authorizations, meeting more than 400 critical security controls established in NIST 800-53 standards. Microsoft 365, Azure and our key AI services are authorized at FedRAMP High. Microsoft 365 Copilot received provisional authorization from the US Department of Defense, with FedRAMP High expected soon.

Investing for the future

Our commitment goes beyond technology and savings. Microsoft is also committing $20 million in additional support services to help agencies implement the offers and maximize the value of these services, along with complimentary cost-optimization workshops that will enable agencies to identify opportunities to reduce software duplication, automate services and improve cross-team interoperability. These investments reflect our belief that technology’s greatest value lies in its ability to empower people.

Taken together, we anticipate these services have the potential to deliver more than $6 billion in total estimated value over three years.

For more than four decades, Microsoft has been privileged to support the US government’s most vital missions. Today, as we stand at the forefront of the AI era, we reaffirm our dedication to serving as a trusted partner — one that listens, innovates responsibly and shares in the mission to advance the nation’s public good. We look forward to the next chapter helping agencies harness secure AI and cloud solutions to build a stronger, more resilient and more innovative future for all.

To learn how to take advantage of these offers, contact your Microsoft representative or authorized reseller*. For any additional questions, you can email our Microsoft OneGov team.

*Microsoft OneGov offers are applicable to Microsoft federal customers with Enterprise Agreements and exclude AOS-G and CSP programs; Azure Consumption Discounts and waived egress fees applicable to select Governmentwide Acquisition Contracts.

The post Accelerating AI adoption for the US government appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Today, Microsoft and the US General Services Administration (GSA) announced a comprehensive agreement to bring a suite of productivity, cloud and AI services, including Microsoft 365 Copilot at no cost for up to 12 months for millions of existing Microsoft G5 users, to help agencies rapidly adopt secure and compliant advanced AI tools that will enhance…
The post Accelerating AI adoption for the US government appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More

Over the past fiscal year, our customers and partners have driven pragmatic outcomes by implementing AI-first strategies across their organizations. With AI Transformation as their framework, we helped them enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes and bend the curve on innovation for their people, businesses and industries. Now, we are partnering to go beyond what they thought possible to unlock even greater potential by restructuring and centralizing their business strategies with an AI-first mindset. Our cloud and AI capabilities are leading the industry, and we are committed to working closely with our customers and partners to meet their increasingly complex needs and help them become frontier AI firms.

Below are several stories from the past quarter reflecting the success we have seen broadly this past year. Each showcases what we can achieve together with an approach grounded in AI business solutions, cloud and AI platforms, and security.

AI is blurring the lines between personal and organizational productivity, and we are helping our customers leverage Copilots and agents combined with human ambition to create differentiation.

With over one million customers in Argentina, Banco Ciudad launched a digital transformation initiative focused on AI, productivity and security. What began as a pilot program quickly grew into broad adoption with the bank implementing Microsoft 365 Copilot to improve productivity, Microsoft Copilot Studio to develop agents and Microsoft Azure to scale their AI solutions. As a result, the bank strengthened its operational resilience, empowered teams, drove sustainable growth and improved customer engagement — even in a challenging economic environment. So far, the bank has freed up 2,400 employee work hours annually with savings projected to generate $75,000 USD monthly.

As one of the country’s largest financial institutions, Commonwealth Bank of Australia is harnessing AI to meet rising customer expectations by developing smarter, more secure and highly customizable banking experiences at scale. To ensure employees have the confidence and expertise to leverage AI effectively, the bank launched a structured skilling initiative to empower them with the knowledge needed to adopt AI effectively. Eighty-four percent of 10,000 Microsoft 365 Copilot users reported they would not go back to working without it; and nearly 30% of GitHub Copilot code suggestions were adopted, driving efficiency and smarter decision-making.

Nonprofit Make-A-Wish is dedicated to granting hope by fulfilling wishes for children with critical illnesses across the United States. Fragmented systems, limited data access and the need to protect sensitive information were creating challenges for the organization to operate effectively, so it turned to partner Redapt for support. Make-A-Wish deployed comprehensive Microsoft cloud and AI solutions — including Azure Cloud Services, Microsoft Fabric, Microsoft 365 Copilot and Copilot Studio — to unify its data, rebuild core applications and boost staff productivity. This transformation enabled the organization to increase operational efficiency, improve collaboration across national and regional chapters and strengthen its data security to protect sensitive family data.

Sheló NABEL, a wellness and beauty company based in Mexico, faced operational challenges as it expanded its network of independent entrepreneurs. With support from partner Best Practices Consulting, the company integrated Microsoft Dynamics 365 to gain real-time market insights and optimize its demand planning across more than 400 products. They also integrated Microsoft Copilot to enhance customer service and increase operational efficiency with AI. As a result, the company has achieved a 17% increase in sales, 5X faster reporting processes and real-time inventory control.

Based in Saudi Arabia, technology and communications company Unifonic serves millions of people across 160 countries. As their business began to scale rapidly, they faced challenges managing a growing hybrid workforce while maintaining strong security and compliance standards. To solve this, the company deployed Microsoft 365 E5 and Microsoft 365 Copilot to automate workflows and secure data in one platform. This unified ecosystem enabled teams to reduce time spent on audits by 85%, save two hours per day on cybersecurity governance, save $250,000 USD in costs and reduce time to set up client demos by 15%.

Microsoft has the leading cloud platform for AI innovation with Azure as the infrastructure, Azure AI Foundry as the applications server and Fabric as the data platform.

As legal professionals face challenges with manual data entry, document generation and compliance-heavy processes, Assembly Software aimed to transform how they handle complex, time-consuming workflows. Using Azure AI Foundry, the company built NeosAI — a fully embedded generative AI solution that automates nearly every aspect of the legal workflow — from document intake to drafting and reporting. As a result, law firms using NeosAI report saving up to 25 hours per case, with document drafting time reduced from 40 hours to just minutes. This AI solution is not only boosting productivity and reducing stress for legal professionals but also enabling firms to serve more clients with greater speed and accuracy.

One of the world’s oldest continuously operating companies, Husqvarna Group, faced increasing pressure to modernize its network of factories, supply chains and distribution channels to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape. The company implemented a comprehensive Microsoft Azure solution — including Azure Arc, Azure IoT Operations and Azure OpenAI — to unify cloud and on-premises systems, enable real-time data insights and drive innovation across global manufacturing operations. As a result, the company achieved a 98% reduction in data deployment time, cut infrastructure imaging costs by 50% and significantly improved productivity and uptime across its connected factories.

Serving over 600,000 members in the United States, Members 1st Federal Credit Union sought to modernize its data infrastructure to deliver more personalized member experiences and support data-driven decision-making. The credit union faced challenges with siloed data across more than 15 sources and legacy systems with limited analytics capabilities. With support from partner 3Cloud, the credit union combined Azure SQL, Azure Data Factory and Azure Databricks to extract, log and centralize enterprise-wide data into a cutting-edge data lakehouse. Machine learning models that took 36 hours to run can now be done in three to four hours — a reduction of about 89%. Additionally, updates within its customer relationship management software now take 30 to 40 minutes compared to three to four hours previously.

NTT DATA, a global IT and business services leader headquartered in Japan, sought to accelerate decision-making and unlock deeper insights by overcoming limitations of legacy dashboards and siloed data systems. Serving clients in over 50 countries, the company needed a more intuitive, scalable and AI-driven approach to data access and analysis. NTT DATA deployed Microsoft Fabric, Azure AI Foundry Agent Service and Azure AI Foundry to enable the creation of conversational AI tools that allow employees to retrieve and act on real-time data. This agentic AI platform significantly improved productivity, reduced time to market for new solutions by 50% and laid the foundation for broader adoption of multi-agent frameworks across the organization.

University of Venda, a public higher education institution in South Africa, modernized its IT infrastructure to support its strategic goal of producing globally competitive graduates while meeting the evolving needs of its regional and international students. Facing challenges with aging on-premises servers, frequent service interruptions and a six-month hardware procurement cycle, the university sought a more agile and reliable solution. By deploying Microsoft 365, migrating 18 systems to Microsoft Azure and leveraging Microsoft Unified Support, the university achieved 99% service uptime and reduced resource provisioning time from six months to under 12 hours. This transformation significantly improved system reliability, scalability and security, enabling students and staff to access essential services seamlessly from anywhere. 

Security is the foundation for AI Transformation. We are helping our customers and partners defend against threat actors and secure their environments with Microsoft’s cloud and AI solutions. 

Following its spinoff from Eli Lilly, Elanco sought to modernize its IT and security infrastructure by building a secure, scalable digital environment from the ground up. The company deployed a comprehensive Microsoft solution stack comprised of Microsoft 365 E5, Microsoft Defender suite, Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Intune and Microsoft Security Copilot. This integrated approach streamlined global IT operations across 90 countries, enabling Elanco to accelerate security response times by 50% with a future-ready, secure and efficient digital ecosystem that empowers their workforce.

Kern County faced significant challenges securing and governing their data across 40 departments — each operating with fragmented IT systems. With an approach grounded in data protection, the county deployed Microsoft Purview as part of its Microsoft 365 Government G5 suite. The implementation resulted in the classification of over 13 million files, near-total adoption of sensitivity labels and over 3,000 data loss prevention alerts in a single month. A validation assessment also showed the county saved about $1 million in mitigation risk and potential noncompliance. This transformation strengthened audit readiness, reduced data exposure risks and laid a secure foundation for future innovation.

Headquartered in the Czech Republic, Mews provides cloud-based property management solutions to help modernize hotel operations worldwide. As it scaled its platform to serve thousands of properties worldwide, the company faced increasing cybersecurity threats and sought to strengthen its security posture and streamline threat detection. By deploying Microsoft Sentinel, Microsoft Defender for Cloud, Microsoft Entra ID and Microsoft Security Copilot, they enabled real-time monitoring, automated threat response and centralized visibility across its cloud infrastructure. As a result, the company reduced incident response times from hours to minutes and enhanced its ability to meet stringent compliance requirements to ensure secure growth in a highly regulated industry.

Puritan Life Insurance Company of America transformed its business model by launching Canvas Annuity — a direct-to-consumer digital distribution platform built entirely on Microsoft Azure. With the security features built into the technology out of the box, the team can detect and block malware attacks and threats, manage security efficiently and more easily pass regulatory, financial and information security audits. By creating a secure, scalable and user-friendly platform, customers can now purchase annuities online in just 10 minutes — a speed previously unheard of. Since launching, the company has seen a 700% increase in annual premium revenue, with the platform now accounting for 75% of premiums every year.

Facing growing cyber threats to its research, Singapore Management University needed to maintain seamless access for students and faculty while ensuring compliance with the country’s stringent data privacy regulations. The university implemented Microsoft’s Zero Trust framework by integrating Microsoft Security Copilot with Microsoft’s comprehensive security suite to strengthen protection while maintaining academic accessibility. This helped reduce response times and ease workloads for security teams while also supporting security analysts to streamline incident investigations, summarize complex multistage attacks and receive guided response recommendations in real time. The integrated security solution reduced operational costs and enhanced compliance reporting while maintaining seamless access to research resources.

For additional AI Transformation stories, check out AI-powered success—with more than 1,000 stories of customer transformation and innovation.

I could not be more excited by our mission than I am today — and I believe we have never been closer to bringing it to life than we are right now. With Microsoft’s leading technology and expertise, we are helping our customers and partners implement AI to bring out the best in individuals, organizations and companies. We are partnering to reinvent their business strategies and move beyond AI adoption alone to innovate with purpose and shape their futures as frontier AI firms. The opportunity to differentiate your business through AI Transformation and pave the way for industry leadership is now.

The post How Microsoft’s customers and partners accelerated AI Transformation in FY25 to innovate with purpose and shape their future success appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.

Over the past fiscal year, our customers and partners have driven pragmatic outcomes by implementing AI-first strategies across their organizations. With AI Transformation as their framework, we helped them enrich employee experiences, reinvent customer engagement, reshape business processes and bend the curve on innovation for their people, businesses and industries. Now, we are partnering to…
The post How Microsoft’s customers and partners accelerated AI Transformation in FY25 to innovate with purpose and shape their future success appeared first on The Official Microsoft Blog.Read More