Microsoft The company said in a statement Friday that it plans to spend $80 billion in fiscal 2025 on building data centers that can handle artificial intelligence workloads. Blog post.

Microsoft Vice Chair and President Brad Smith wrote that more than half of the expected AI infrastructure spending will be in the US. Microsoft’s 2025 fiscal year ends in June.

“Today, the United States is leading the global AI race thanks to private capital investment and innovation by American companies of all sizes, from dynamic startups to well-established enterprises,” said Smith. “At Microsoft, we’ve seen this through our partnership with OpenAI, emerging firms like Anthropic and xAI, and our own AI-powered software platforms and applications.”

Many high-tech companies are rushing to spend billions. Nvidia A graphics processing unit for training and running AI models. The rapid deployment of OpenAI’s ChatGPT assistant, which launched in late 2022, has started a race for AI to deliver its creative AI capabilities for companies. After investing more than $13 billion in OpenAI, Microsoft provides startups with cloud infrastructure and has incorporated its models into Windows, Teams and other products.

Microsoft made $20 billion in capital expenditures and assets under finance leases worldwide in the first quarter of fiscal 2025, including $14.9 billion in property and equipment. In October

Analysts surveyed by Visible Alpha were looking for $63.2 billion in fiscal 2025, excluding property and equipment, implying 42 percent growth.

Microsoft’s revenue from Azure and other cloud services grew 33 percent year over year, with 12 percentage points of that growth coming from AI services.

Smith called on the incoming administration of President-elect Donald Trump to protect the country’s leadership in AI through education and the promotion of American AI technologies abroad.

“China is offering subsidized access to rare chips to developing countries, and is promising to build local AI data centers,” Smith wrote. “The Chinese wisely recognize that if a country standardizes on China’s AI platform, it will continue to rely on that platform in the future.”

“The best response for America is not to complain about the competition but to make sure we win the race ahead,” he added.