Microsoft has purchased another large swath of land to expand its data center footprint in Atlanta, one of the nation’s fastest-growing regions for the facilities needed for artificial intelligence and other advanced computing projects.
The tech giant, based in Redmond near Seattle, paid $56.4 million to buy 161 acres along Highway 74 south of Atlanta in Fayette and south Fulton counties on April 30, adding to more than 145 acres that Microsoft snapped up the previous two months in Fulton County for new data center facilities, according to county property deeds and tax records.
Microsoft's latest moves come as Atlanta's data center market grew at the fastest rates in the nation between 2022 and 2023, with projects under construction driven by demand from large cloud service providers and social media companies increasing 211%, according to a report from CBRE.
Microsoft has paid a total $115 million for about 315 acres since February to expand its Atlanta data center network in the latest of a series of moves to ramp up development of projects needed for artificial intelligence and other advanced computing projects, including a $3.3 billion investment to expand its data center campus in southwest Wisconsin
The land purchases near Atlanta come more than three years after the company announced that it would build its East US 3 data center region in Georgia’s Fulton and Douglas counties to support its Azure Cloud services, faster service and data security.
The investments would “put Atlanta on the path toward becoming one of Microsoft’s largest hubs in the United States in the coming decade, after Puget Sound and Silicon Valley,” according to a company statement in February 2021.