Microsoft is building datacenter superclusters that span continents

Microsoft believes the next generation of AI models will use hundreds of trillions of parameters. To train them, it's not just building bigger, more efficient datacenters – it's started connecting distant facilities using high-speed networks spanning hundreds or thousands of miles.

The first node of this multi-datacenter cluster came online in October, connecting Microsoft's datacenter campus in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, to a facility in Atlanta, Georgia.

The software giant’s goal is to eventually scale AI workloads across datacenters using similar methods as employed to distribute high-performance computing and AI workloads across multiple servers today.

"To make improvements in the capabilities of the AI, you need to have larger and larger infrastructure to train it," said Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich in a canned statement. "The amount of infrastructure required now to train these models is not just one datacenter, not two, but multiples of that."

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