Microsoft Slowed AI Spending. Now It’s Playing Catchup

Microsoft is playing catch-up in the AI power race by grabbing big sites in Texas and West Virginia for data centers fired by natural gas. It wasn’t long ago that the company had a big lead. In the early days of the AI boom, Microsoft’s in-house energy team amassed a 9-gigawatt war chest of grid-powered data center sites that was the envy of the industry, according to people with knowledge of its pipeline and Wall Street tallies of announced projects. That war chest was the equivalent of nine nuclear reactors.