Microsoft plans to invest $3.3 billion in an artificial intelligence-related initiative in Wisconsin, giving a boost to President Joe Biden’s job-creation efforts in the key election battleground state.
The investment, according to a Microsoft announcement on Wednesday, will go toward expanding the tech giant’s cloud computing and AI infrastructure capacity, with the development of a state-of-the-art data center campus in Racine, Wisc.
Microsoft also plans to create the country’s first manufacturing-focused AI co-innovation lab, and an AI skilling initiative to equip more than 100,000 Wisconsin residents with essential AI skills.
The data center project is expected to create 2,300 union construction jobs in the area by 2025, and 2,000 permanent jobs over time — numbers that Biden touted in his own news release, which took shots at former President Donald Trump’s inability to come through for Wisconsin residents and workers.
Biden said the data center will be built on the same land as a failed $10 billion investment from Taiwanese electronics manufacturer Foxconn six years ago.
Biden said Trump’s Foxconn plan called for 13,000 manufacturing jobs in the region, but “after 100 homes and farms were bulldozed to make way for the manufacturing plant and over $500 million in taxpayer dollars were invested to prepare the site, no such investment materialized.”
As part of his “Investing in America” agenda, Biden was meeting Wednesday in Wisconsin with Microsoft President Brad Smith at Gateway Technical College to announce the new investment. Along with building the physical data center, Microsoft said it will partner with Gateway to build a Data Center Academy to train and certify more than 1,000 students in five years to work in the new data center and IT sector jobs created in the area.
In remarks before Biden took the stage, Smith said he lived in Wisconsin from age 9 to 14, just a few miles from where he was speaking. He said his family dog came from a farm that is now part of the land where they are building the new data center.
Biden thanked Smith for his partnership and for showing “how we can get things done, big things done, in America.”
The president called out a “trail of broken promises” by Trump, including the failed Foxconn project.
“[Trump] came here with your senator, Ron Johnson, literally holding a golden shovel, promising to build the eighth wonder of the world,” Biden said. “Are you kidding me? Look what happened. They dug a hole and then they fell into it. … Foxconn turned out to be just that — a con.”
In a separate appearance on CNN Wednesday morning, Smith said Wisconsin has a legacy of manufacturing and innovation, and is a place “where people get things done by working together.” Asked about the political implications of Microsoft’s plans during an election year, Smith said “Microsoft isn’t running for anything,” but that the Biden administration has been “enormously helpful” on the AI project.
