Microsoft pledges community-first AI infrastructure approach

• We’ll create jobs for your residents. This includes investing in partnerships to train local construction workers; expand its Datacentre Academy programme to train more individuals for ongoing operations roles; and encouraging policymakers to support new job opportunities.
• We’ll add to the tax base to fund your local hospitals, schools, parks, and libraries. This includes not asking municipalities to reduce their local property tax rates for data centres; and supporting policies to invest the added taxes it pays in vital services the community cares about.
• We’ll strengthen your community by investing in local AI training and nonprofits. This includes partnering with schools, community colleges and universities to provide AI training; support adults with AI tools and skills through AI learning hubs in local libraries; support AI skills training for businesses; and investing in local profits.

To demonstrate how some of these approaches will work, Smith points to Quincy, Washington, a small agricultural community about 150 miles east of Seattle where Microsoft built its first data centre in 2008. Since then, it has built more than 20 in the area.

It is an arid region where the local groundwater supply was already under pressure so to avoid drawing from the community’s potable water, it partnered with the city to construct the Quincy Water Reuse Utility, which treats and recirculates data centre cooling water rather than relying on local groundwater. It claims this protects limited drinking-water supplies while ensuring that high-quality, recycled water can be used for data centre cooling needs.

“One enduring lesson is that successful infrastructure buildouts will only progress when communities feel that the gains outweigh the costs”

It has also provided ongoing employment to thousands of construction workers for almost two decades in the community. Hundreds of technicians in those data centres reportedly earn salaries well above the median income for Quincy. Microsoft estimates for every direct construction job created, another one is created in related sectors, including security services, maintenance and repair, retail, restaurants, and more. Altogether, Microsoft claims its data centres drive more than $200m in regional economic activity each year.

As a result, the share of Quincy residents living below the poverty line has been cut in half, dropping from 29.4 per cent in 2013 to 13.1 per cent in 2023.

Smith describe the company’s plans in detail here (where you can also find out more about its work in Quincy and other areas) and adds that they will evolve and improve, based on what it learns from ongoing engagement with local communities across the country.

Smith writes that many lessons emerge from the nation’s 250-year history relating to technology and infrastructure including that major infrastructure expansion “is always difficult” and the most important decisions are often made at the local level.

But he adds as a final lesson that private companies can help by stepping up and acting in a responsible way: “We cannot surmount inevitable community challenges by ourselves. But we can make everything easier by embracing a long-term vision. By recognising our responsibility. By playing a constructive role. And by supporting the entire community.”