Is Microsoft playing Biden’s game against Trump?
Microsoft will build an artificial intelligence data center in Wisconsin: an investment worth over 3 billion dollars that Biden will need to put Trump in a bad light in the elections. Here because
Microsoft has invested $3.3 billion to build a new artificial intelligence data center in Racine, Wisconsin. The news, in addition to confirming the company's strong interest in this technology – now central to the plans of almost all Big Tech companies, as demonstrated by the numerous startup acquisitions – is interesting for two other reasons.
BIDEN'S INTEREST IN WISCONSIN
The first reason is that the data center will be built in the same location where some time ago Foxconn, an important Taiwanese electronic components company, committed to investing 10 billion dollars in a liquid crystal display factory: but the project failed.
The second reason is that Microsoft's investment was announced by the President of the United States, Joe Biden, who has an interest in promoting opportunities for economic growth and employment in view of next November's elections.
The Biden administration, in fact, underlined that, unlike that of Foxconn, Microsoft's investment in Wisconsin – a swing state , that is, a state in which there is no clear majority of voters of the Democratic or Republican Party – will create 2300 unionized jobs in the construction sector plus two thousand permanent jobs, as well as stimulate the development of the digital economy in the area.
MICROSOFT PROJECTS FOR TRAINING
Microsoft plans to partner with Gateway Technical College and create a “Datacenter Academy” to train 1,000 Wisconsinites by the end of the decade. The company will also build a laboratory – called Co-Innovation Lab – in the southeastern part of the state and will collaborate with Gener8tor, a startup accelerator, to train a thousand local entrepreneurs on how to use artificial intelligence in the workplace.
THE FOXCONN PROJECT, WRECKED
Microsoft's investment in Racine comes six years after Foxconn's announcement of a 10 billion dollar investment – at the time Donald Trump was in the White House – which was expected to create thirteen thousand jobs in the manufacturing sector. The Biden administration has given a very negative assessment of the project, declaring that after the demolition of a hundred homes and farms to make way for the plant, and after a public expenditure of 500 million dollars to prepare the site, "there has been no no investment materialized."
The White House statement also states that “in the four years before President Biden took office, one thousand manufacturing jobs left Racine and six thousand manufacturing jobs left Wisconsin.”
The Biden administration, as Quartz recalls, has invested billions of dollars to promote the development of artificial intelligence in the United States also through the CHIPS Act, the stimulus law for domestic semiconductor manufacturing which has encouraged several companies – both American, such as Intel, as well as foreign ones, such as TSMC and Samsung – to open factories in the country.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/innovazione/microsoft-centro-dati-intelligenza-artificiale-3-miliardi/ on Thu, 09 May 2024 10:18:45 +0000.