On January 26, the Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, village board voted unanimously to approve site plans for 15 new Microsoft data centers adjacent to its existing campus. The approvals cover two parcels totaling nearly 9 million square feet of buildable area and call for the construction of three new electrical substations. Microsoft acquired the larger parcel through purchases from the village and private landowners in 2023 and 2024. According to submitted documents, the aggregate taxable value of the proposed development exceeds $13 billion. During a public comment session, six residents voiced support, citing long-term economic benefits, while three raised concerns about the permanence of construction jobs. Village board president David DeGroot emphasized that union workers are expected to remain on site for up to ten years, noting that this duration exceeds most temporary-job definitions. With site plans now approved, Microsoft may proceed with civil engineering submissions and building permit applications, potentially sustaining local employment through 2035.

Microsoft has launched its second-generation AI inference processor, the Maia 200, designed to accelerate production workloads in its Azure cloud data centers. Built on a 3-nanometer process, each chip contains more than 100 billion transistors and delivers over 10 petaflops of 4-bit compute and approximately 5 petaflops of 8-bit performance. Servers hosting Maia 200 each integrate four interconnected chips, which Microsoft says can be networked into clusters of up to 6,144 processors using high-speed Ethernet. The company claims the new design offers 30% higher performance per dollar compared with leading third-party alternatives and that annual power consumption per inference petaflop will decline by nearly 20% versus its previous generation. Microsoft has begun deploying Maia 200 in its U.S. Central data region, with plans to expand availability to additional zones later this year, supporting both its in-house superintelligence initiatives and commercial AI offerings such as its Copilot platform.