Microsoft said it would invest $2.9 billion ($4.4 billion) over two years to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in Japan, the latest in a series of overseas expansions by large tech firms to support the development of artificial intelligence.
The investment – the company’s largest in the 46 years of its operations in the country – will also go towards skilling 3 million people in AI and setting up a Microsoft Research Asia lab in Tokyo.
Server operators are expanding their data centres and cloud computing assets globally to support a boom in AI applications and workloads, after the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT.
Amazon.com’s cloud unit is investing US$10 billion in Mississippi and another US$5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia towards data centres in those regions.
Google is building a data centre just outside London for US$1 billion.
Microsoft’s Azure, Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services are the top three cloud computing companies in the world.
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