Microsoft’s Satya Nadella spoke about AI and cybersecurity in a meeting with US President-elect Donald Trump and Elon Musk, becoming the latest technology industry leader to take office in the new administration.
The conversation touched on a wide range of topics, including Microsoft’s commitment to invest $80 billion in AI data centers around the world, the company said in a statement.
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More than $50 billion of that money will be spent in the United States, creating American jobs, the statement said. Microsoft President Brad Smith attended the meeting along with President Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance.
Silicon Valley has sought to strengthen ties with President Trump since his victory last November, despite frequent clashes during his first term. Many have visited Trump’s Mar-a-Lago mansion in Florida, where the president-elect and Musk have held a series of private meetings and dinners to discuss their next plans. Semaphore first reported Nadella and Trump’s dinner.
Smith warned the incoming Trump administration against “heavy-handed regulation” related to AI. “America’s most important public policy priority is to ensure that America’s private sector can keep moving forward with the wind at its back,” Smith wrote this month.
The country has “strong security protections for AI components in trusted data centers and the ability for U.S. companies to rapidly expand and provide reliable sources of supply to many countries that are allies and friends of the United States.” We need a realistic export control policy that strikes a balance,” Smith said. I wrote.
Cloud infrastructure providers such as Microsoft and Amazon.com Inc. are competing to expand computing power by building new data centers. In the last fiscal year ending June 2024, Microsoft spent more than $50 billion in capital expenditures, much of it related to building server farms driven by demand for artificial intelligence services.
Much of the data center spending is on high-performance chips from companies like Nvidia Corp. and infrastructure providers like Dell Technologies Inc. Large AI-enabled server farms require a lot of power, so Microsoft has signed a deal to restart its data centers. The reactor at Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant in Pennsylvania, where the infamous partial meltdown occurred in 1979. Amazon and Google have also signed nuclear power agreements.
