One of the largest data center campuses under construction in Georgia has its first operational tenant, and it’s one of the most recognizable names in technology.

Microsoft recently unveiled a new data center near Atlanta that is part of its first artificial intelligence “superfactory,” an effort the company calls Fairwater.

The facility began operations in October, spans more than 1 million square feet and directly connects to a Fairwater center in Wisconsin, where the company intends to train the next generation of AI models.

A company spokesperson told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution the facility is located in Fayetteville but declined to provide a specific location. Records obtained by the AJC through an open records request reveal the only suitable site permitted for data center occupancy in Fayetteville is within a 615-acre campus developed by QTS — one of the largest such projects under construction in the state.

A new data center campus is shown under construction, Thursday, May 29, 2025. Developed by QTS, the data center campus near Fayetteville is one of the largest under construction in Georgia. (Miguel Martinez/ AJC)

A spokesperson for QTS, a subsidiary of private equity giant Blackstone, said the company does not disclose customers. The Fayette County Development Authority, which helped recruit the multi-billion dollar QTS project to Fayetteville, declined to comment.

The scale and connectivity of Microsoft’s Fairwater effort is unprecedented for the Redmond, Washington-based company, which is vying with other tech giants to win the AI arms race. Mark Russinovich, chief technical officer and technical fellow for Microsoft Azure, the company’s cloud computing platform, said data center infrastructure like that in the new metro Atlanta facility is only the beginning.

“To make improvements in the capabilities of the AI, you need to have larger and larger infrastructure to train it,” Russinovich said in a news release. “The amount of infrastructure required now to train these models is not just one data center, not two, but multiples of that.”

The equipment within Microsoft's Fairwater data center in Fayetteville is designed to train artificial intelligence models. (Courtesy of Microsoft)

The QTS project along Georgia Highway 54 in Fayetteville was first unveiled in August 2022 under the code name “Project Excalibur.” QTS bought the 615 acres of rural land for $154 million and planned billions of dollars of investment, envisioning up to 7 million square feet of data centers.

That’s the floor space of about four-and-a-half Lenox Square malls.

QTS, which also operates one of the Southeast’s largest data center campuses near the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta, leases its computer storage space to a variety of companies. Security at QTS data centers, and all similar facilities, is paramount and typically features gates, on-site security forces and several biometric scans to access server floors.

Fayetteville issued a certificate of occupancy for the first building within the QTS campus in May, and a subsequent construction completion certificate was issued Sept. 25, according to the documents obtained by the AJC. They are the only such certificates issued in the city in the past five years.

Outside of Fayetteville, only one other large data center campus has been proposed in the county: Project Rita near Tyrone.

Niki Vanderslice, president and CEO of the Fayette County Development Authority, told the AJC in July that it will likely take years before another similar project joins those two.

“As of right now, we don’t have any sites that would be conducive to an additional data center,” she said. “It’s not a pause, but we would like for the community to realize the benefits before we move forward on any more.”

This data center campus near Fayetteville is 7 million square feet, or the floor space of about four-and-a-half Lenox Square malls. (Miguel Martinez/ AJC)

Microsoft, meanwhile, has found ample room to grow its data center operations on Atlanta’s Southside.

The company is developing a 2.1 million-square-foot data center in Union City that is being built by EdgeConnex. Microsoft has also paid at least $171 million to acquire more than 480 acres across Atlanta’s Southside for data center development, adding to a rush of computer server storage facilities that are being built across the region.

The data center development boom has thrust the Atlanta area into the upper echelon of computer server storage markets, second to only Northern Virginia, according to data from real estate services firm CBRE. The fast-growing sector has sparked controversy over its electricity and water usage, prompting pushback and protest from neighborhood groups and environmentalists — including in Fayette County.

Microsoft said its Fairwater facility uses an improved closed-loop cooling system that “consumes almost zero water in its operation.” Alistair Speirs, a Microsoft general manager, said the facility’s connectivity is unique and needed to fulfill its AI training needs.