Microsoft Corp. has pulled back on data centre projects around the world, suggesting the company is taking a harder look at its plans to build the server farms powering artificial intelligence and the cloud.
The software company has recently halted talks for, or delayed development of, sites in Indonesia, the UK, Australia, Illinois, North Dakota and Wisconsin, according to people familiar with the situation.
Microsoft is widely seen as a leader in commercializing AI services, largely thanks to its close partnership with OpenAI. Investors closely track Microsoft’s spending plans to get a sense of long-term customer demand for cloud and AI services.
It’s hard to know how much of the company’s data center pullback reflects expectations of diminished demand versus temporary construction challenges, such as shortages of power and building materials. Some investors have interpreted signs of retrenchment as an indication that projected purchases of AI services don’t justify Microsoft’s massive outlays on server farms.
Those concerns have weighed on global tech stocks in recent weeks, particularly chipmakers like Nvidia Corp. which suck up a significant share of data center budgets. Shares of Microsoft are down about 9 per cent this year.
Microsoft acknowledged making changes to its data center plans but declined to discuss most of the projects.
“We plan our data center capacity needs years in advance to ensure we have sufficient infrastructure in the right places,” a spokesperson said. “As AI demand continues to grow, and our data center presence continues to expand, the changes we have made demonstrates the flexibility of our strategy.”
Microsoft recently withdrew from negotiations to lease space between London and Cambridge in the U.K. at a site being marketed for its ability to host advanced Nvidia chips, according to people familiar with the talks, who requested anonymity to discuss a private matter.
The company has also halted negotiations for data center space at a site near Chicago, according to a person familiar with the talks.
Microsoft, which has leased excess cloud-computing capacity from CoreWeave Inc., recently backed away from a proposal to obtain more, CoreWeave Chief Executive Officer Michael Intrator said in an interview. Intrator didn’t say how many projects were affected or where they’re located but added that CoreWeave has found another buyer for the capacity.
In some cases, Microsoft is delaying construction. For example, it has paused work on parts of a data center campus it owns about an hour outside of Jakarta, according to people familiar with the situation.
Microsoft also has put on hold some planned expansion at a site in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, part of a complex visited by then-President Joe Biden, according to another person.
During the first six months developing the Wisconsin project, Microsoft spent $262 million on construction, according to documents seen by Bloomberg. Almost $40 million of that went to concrete alone.
In other cases, Microsoft has slow-walked negotiations. On a January earnings call, Applied Digital Corp. Chief Executive Officer Wes Cummins told investors that it had been a long process to secure a tenant for a server farm complex in North Dakota. The data center company had originally been in discussions with Microsoft, but talks dragged on so long that an exclusivity clause lapsed, said people familiar with the matter.
Applied Digital has since entered into advanced discussions with other players to lease the site. The company secured extra funding from Macquarie Asset Management to continue developing the project and expects it to come online within the next year.
“Over the past year, we’ve learned that the hyperscaler contract process is extremely thorough,” Cummins said during the January earnings call. The company declined to comment.
In London, Microsoft was negotiating to lease space at Ada Infrastructure’s 210-megawatt Docklands data center but has held off on committing to the project, according to people familiar with the matter. The developer is currently showing the site, located a few kilometers down the river from the Canary Wharf financial center, to other potential tenants, the people said. Parent company Ares Management Corp. declined to comment.
The Microsoft spokesperson said the company remains committed to its $3.3 billion project in Wisconsin, which is expected to come online next year, and said preliminary work on the expansion has commenced. A company spokesperson in Jakarta said Microsoft’s planned Indonesia Central cloud region is on track to go live in the second quarter of 2025, without addressing the pause on portions of the project.
Microsoft says it remains committed to spending about $80 billion building out data centers in its fiscal year that ends in June. The company has previously said that the following fiscal year will see a slower rate of new infrastructure spending, and the focus will shift from new construction to fitting out existing facilities with servers and other equipment.
Analysts have stepped up their scrutiny of data center spending since Chinese upstart DeepSeek announced in January that it had created a competitive AI service using fewer resources than leading US companies. In the long run, new engineering techniques could mean AI will require less computing power than previously expected.
Fueling the skepticism, TD Cowen analysts wrote last week that Microsoft has abandoned new data center projects in the US and Europe that would have amounted to a capacity of about 2 gigawatts of electricity, saying the moves likely represented “data center oversupply relative to its current demand forecast.”
The analysts said the pullback also reflected Microsoft’s choice to forgo some new business from OpenAI, the leading AI startup now valued at $300 billion. OpenAI earlier this year unveiled a joint venture with SoftBank Group Corp. and Oracle Corp. that plans to invest at least $100 billion and as much as $500 billion in AI infrastructure. The same analysts previously said OpenAI is likely shifting some computing from Microsoft to Oracle under that partnership.
In late March, Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. Chairman Joe Tsai warned of a potential bubble forming in data center construction, arguing that the pace of the buildout may outstrip initial demand for AI services.
CoreWeave’s Intrator said that the pullback in data center spending is more specific to Microsoft than the larger industry. “It’s pretty localized, and their relationship with OpenAI has just changed,” he said. “So it stands to reason that there would be some noise.”
Ed Socia, a director at the industry intelligence firm datacenterHawk, said cloud companies are tweaking their server farm plans in an effort to cut costs and prioritize projects that can come online quicker.
“You may have initially thought one data center project would be the fastest speed to market, but then you realize that the labor, supply chain and power delivery wasn’t as quick as you thought,” he said. “Then you would have to shift in the short term to focus on other markets.”
--With assistance from Dina Bass, Gao Yuan, Matt Day, Ben Otto, Olivia Solon and Cindy Wang.
©2025 Bloomberg L.P.
