Satya Nadella — How Microsoft is preparing for AGI
11/12/20251 hr 28 min
As part of this interview, Satya Nadella gave Dylan Patel (founder of SemiAnalysis) and me an exclusive first-look at their brand-new Fairwater 2 datacenter.
Microsoft is building multiple Fairwaters, each of which has hundreds of thousands of GB200s & GB300s. Between all these interconnected buildings, they’ll have over 2 GW of total capacity. Just to give a frame of reference, even a single one of these Fairwater buildings is more powerful than any other AI datacenter that currently exists.
Satya then answered a bunch of questions about how Microsoft is preparing for AGI across all layers of the stack.
Watch on YouTube; read the transcript.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) - Tour through Fairwater 2
(00:03:20) - Business models for AGI
(00:12:48) - Copilot
(00:20:02) - Whose margins will expand most?
(00:36:17) - MAI
(00:47:47) - The hyperscale business
(01:02:44) - In-house chip & OpenAI partnership
(01:09:35) - The CAPEX explosion
(01:15:07) - Will the world trust US companies to lead AI?
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Clips
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsDwarkesh Patel· Host0:00
Today, we are interviewing Satya Nadella. We being me and Dilip Patel, who is founder of SemiAnalysis. Satya, welcome.
Satya Nadella· Guest0:08
Thank you. It's great. Thanks for comin' over to Atlanta.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:10
Yeah. Thank you for giving us the tour of, uh, the new facility. It's been really cool to see.
Satya Nadella· Guest0:14
Absolutely.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:15
Satya and Scott Guthrie, Microsoft's EVP of Cloud and AI, give us a tour of their brand new Fairwater 2 data center, the current most powerful in the world.
Scott Guthrie· Guest0:24
We try to 10X the training capacity every 18 to 24 months, and so this would be effectively a 10X increase, 10X from what GPT-5 was trained with. And so to put it in perspective, the number of optics, the network optics in this building, is almost as much as all of Azure across all our data centers two and a half years ago.
Satya Nadella· Guest0:44
It's kinda, what, five million network connections.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host0:47
You've got all this bandwidth between different sites in a region and between the two regions. So is this like a big bet on scaling in the future, that you anticipate in the future there's gonna be some huge model that needs to require two whole different regions to train?
Satya Nadella· Guest0:59
The goal is to be able to kind of aggregate these FLOPs for a large training job, and then put these things together across sites.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host1:08
Right.
Satya Nadella· Guest1:08
And the reality is, you'll use it for, uh, training, and then you'll use it for data gen, you'll use it for inference in all sort of ways.
Dwarkesh Patel· Host1:17
Yeah.
Satya Nadella· Guest1:17
It's not like it's going to be used only for one workload forever.
Scott Guthrie· Guest1:20
Fairwater 4, which you're gonna see under construction nearby- Mm-hmm. ... yeah, will also be on that one peta- petabits network.
Satya Nadella· Guest1:26
Yep.
Scott Guthrie· Guest1:27
So that we can actually link the two at a very high rate,