Foxconn's Wisconsin manufacturing hub has received a thumbs up from local government officials; after considering a proposed $569 million investment. Major additional funding will be directed into the expansion of the Taiwanese's giant's Racine County operation. According to a fresh Reuters news article, company officials cited a growing demand for AI server equipment—the facility's upcoming upgrades are deemed necessary to strengthen supply chains in the USA. Foxconn's relationship with the Wisconsin Economic Development Corporation (WEDC) seems to be in a better place nowadays; the two organizations have reportedly tussled over tax credits in the recent past. Within that time frame, the multinational electronics manufacturer has claimed that it has spent roughly $2 billion on upkeep of its Mount Pleasant-based site.

Jerry Hsiao, Foxconn's chief product officer, stated to Reuters (today): "as the demand for more data infrastructure continues to rise, Foxconn will keep responding to our customers' needs with flexibility and at scale in the United States." In addition, the boss estimates that the Wisconsin facility's team accounts for about a fourth of the company's total North American workforce. Looking to the future, he believes that the latest cash injection will spur on the creation of 1300+ new roles—by 2030. Original plans for the mega factory—going back to the mid-2010s—focused on the production of LCD panels, but present day market trends have caused a pivot to the pumping out of AI-oriented datacenter gear.

Microsoft announced today that it will bring Fairwater, a purpose-built AI datacenter in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin, online in early 2026. The new site is designed as the most powerful datacenter on the planet, serving as a hub for next-generation model training and inference. The campus covers 315 acres with roughly 1.2 million square feet across three buildings and will house hundreds of thousands of NVIDIA GB200 and GB300 GPUs linked by fiber, which can reportedly circle the globe 4.5 times. While we don't have information on the exact GPU count, Microsoft claims the installation will deliver about 10x the performance of today's fastest supercomputers for frontier AI workloads. With the fastest already deployed cluster being xAI's Colossus 1, this means that this system could have over half a million "Blackwell" and "Blackwell Ultra" GPUs.

Over 90% of compute capacity will use a closed-loop liquid cooling system that is filled during construction and continuously recirculated, backed by what the company describes as the planet's second-largest water-cooled chiller plant. Around 10% of servers will rely on outside air and switch to water cooling only on the hottest days. Storage and I/O are scaled for exabyte-class datasets, and the buildout involved 46.6 miles of deep foundation piles, 26.5 million pounds of structural steel, 120 miles of medium-voltage underground cable, 72.6 miles of mechanical piping, and an external cooling array that includes 172 20-foot fans.

We're incredibly excited to announce that the Apex Legends team at Respawn will continue to strengthen its development team with the introduction of a brand new studio location in Madison, Wisconsin led by industry veteran Ryan Burnett. Ryan is an extraordinary leader with a proven track record in live service games and as a pillar in the massive mid-western game development community in Madison. With nearly two decades of development experience at places like Raven Software and Epic Games, Ryan has a history of inspiring the sort of creativity and innovation in his teams that is the foundation of games like Apex Legends.

It's been our belief since day one that Respawn is not a singular location but a mindset: when passionate and talented people have creative freedom, they'll achieve the unexpected. This view helped us successfully expand to Vancouver in 2019, and as the workplace evolved, it helped us continue to work with the best that the games industry has to offer, whether at the office, remote, or hybrid.