To The Moon

Microsoft's AI Super Factory: The Hidden Winners Across The Stack

$Microsoft(MSFT)$   just put a new flag in the ground for the AI era: an Azure AI data center in Atlanta that it is happy to call the world’s first “planet-scale AI super factory”. The site follows the Fairwater blueprint first unveiled in Wisconsin, with a flat Ethernet network that can knit together hundreds of thousands of $NVIDIA(NVDA)$   GB200 and GB300 GPUs into a single giant supercomputer, tied into an AI-specific wide-area network stretching roughly 120,000 miles of new fiber across the United States.

For investors, that raises a natural question. Beyond Microsoft itself and Nvidia, which listed companies stand to benefit the most as these AI super factories roll out across the map? The answer is less about a single “AI winner” and more about an ecosystem of specialists: neocloud providers renting out extra GPU capacity, networking firms wiring the clusters together, optical and connectivity players lighting up the fiber, and utilities scrambling to deliver clean power at multi-gigawatt scale.

Below, we walk through the key groups highlighted in the graphic and explain what each company actually does, what has already been announced with Microsoft, and where the potential upside lies if Fairwater-style sites become the new normal.

Advanced chip systems: Nvidia at the core

$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ is the heart of the compute layer. Microsoft's Fairwater design is built around the GB200 and GB300 GPU systems, including NVL72 racks that pack 72 GPUs and draw on the order of 140 kilowatts per rack. Public reporting suggests that Microsoft's initial Wisconsin Fairwater site alone will host hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs, with additional capacity to follow in Atlanta and beyond.

For Microsoft, the bet is that training and serving next-generation models on this scale will justify tens of billions of dollars in capex. For Nvidia, every new Fairwater-class site means another wave of very high-margin system sales.

Neocloud providers: overflow GPU muscle for Fairwater

Think of neoclouds as AI-focused mini-hyperscalers. They buy or lease GPUs in bulk, build dense clusters and then rent them out by the hour. Microsoft already spends tens of billions of dollars on capacity from this group to complement its own Fairwater build-out.

$CoreWeave (CRWV.US)$ is not publicly tied to a specific Fairwater site, but the strategy Satya Nadella describes as a “fungible fleet” of GPUs that can serve any workload fits neatly with outsourcing overflow demand to partners like CoreWeave.

$IREN Ltd (IREN.US)$ is another former crypto miner that has pivoted into being a neocloud and data-center operator. In 2025 it signed a five-year infrastructure agreement with Microsoft worth up to 9.7 billion dollars, under which IREN will build new AI data centers powered by about 200 megawatts of capacity to serve Microsoft workloads.

$NEBIUS (NBIS.US)$ is an AI infrastructure provider spun out of Yandex and now listed in the US. It focuses on high-performance GPU clusters hosted in Europe and the Middle East. In October 2025, Nebius announced a five-year, 17.4 billion dollar agreement with Microsoft to provide AI infrastructure capacity, including the deployment of systems with roughly one hundred thousand Nvidia GB300 GPUs.

Network switch vendors: building the AI freeways

Fairwater sites use a two-tier Ethernet backend network that offers 800 gigabit per second links and runs Microsoft's open-source SONiC operating system. That architecture is vendor-neutral by design, which is good news for a mix of switch and silicon suppliers.

$Arista Networks (ANET.US)$ is a specialist in high-speed data-center switches and the software that runs them. Microsoft and Meta are its two largest customers, together representing roughly a third of revenue, with Microsoft's share rising in recent years.

$Cisco (CSCO.US)$ is the largest networking vendor in the world and a long-time partner of Microsoft across both enterprise and cloud. Cisco and Microsoft jointly market Azure Local solutions using Cisco UCS servers, and Cisco is a formal partner in Microsoft's Azure programs.

$Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE.US)$ sells servers, storage and networking equipment and has a deep, decades-long partnership with Microsoft. The two companies jointly offer Azure Stack HCI and HPE GreenLake for Azure, giving enterprises hybrid solutions that blend on-premise hardware with Azure services.

$NVIDIA (NVDA.US)$ is best known for its GPUs, but it is also a networking player. Fairwater’s flat architecture is expected to use Nvidia's GB200 and GB300 accelerators combined with high-performance interconnects. Nvidia sells InfiniBand switches and adapters for scale-up training clusters and Spectrum-X Ethernet systems tuned for AI workloads, any of which can slot into Microsoft's design depending on cost and latency targets.

$Broadcom (AVGO.US)$ dominates the market for merchant Ethernet switch silicon through its Tomahawk and Jericho chip families. Industry analysis and company commentary point to wins at all of the major cloud providers, including Microsoft, for both AI and general cloud networking.

$Marvell Technology (MRVL.US)$ designs custom and semi-custom chips for hyperscalers as well as optical DSPs that sit inside 400G, 800G and now 1.6T optical modules. Management has said that three of the four big AI hyperscalers, a group that includes Microsoft, use Marvell technology, and AI is expected to represent roughly 30 percent of company revenue in 2025.

Data center connectivity stack: lighting up the AI nervous system

Behind the big switches sits a dense optical stack: connectors, fibers, transceivers and chip-to-chip links. Many of the companies below already have disclosed collaborations with Microsoft around Azure and AI, while others are broadly exposed to hyperscale AI build-outs.

$Amphenol (APH.US)$ makes high-speed connectors, cables and, increasingly, low-power optical transceiver modules used in AI clusters. Its IT datacom segment tied to data centers is its fastest-growing business, with sales more than doubling year on year, helped by surging AI rack demand.

$Corning (GLW.US)$ is a leading supplier of optical fiber and cable. In 2025 Microsoft Azure announced a strategic collaboration with Corning and Heraeus to scale production of hollow-core fiber, which moves light through an air core for lower latency and higher performance. Corning's North Carolina plants will manufacture hollow-core fiber specifically for Microsoft's networks. That makes Corning a rare “named” partner in Microsoft's plan to upgrade its AI network backbone, including the AI WAN that links Fairwater sites.

$Ciena (CIEN.US)$ builds optical transport systems used to move data between and across metros. A recent joint white paper from Ciena and Microsoft describes a zero-trust optical architecture for resilient metro connectivity, using Ciena's 6500 platforms and Waveserver systems to underpin Microsoft’s tiered business continuity design.

$Credo Technology (CRDO.US)$ designs low-power SerDes chips, DSPs and active electrical cable solutions for 400G, 800G and 1.6T links inside data centers. It counts large cloud providers as key customers, though like most chip companies it does not usually name them.

$Astera Labs (ALAB.US)$ specializes in connectivity silicon like CXL memory controllers and retimers for PCIe and Ethernet. It is a promoter member of the UALink Consortium, whose board includes Microsoft alongside $Advanced Micro Devices (AMD.US)$ , AWS, Cisco, $Alphabet-C (GOOG.US)$ and HPE, and its chips already appear in a large share of AI server designs.

$Coherent (COHR.US)$ supplies coherent optical transceivers used for data center interconnect and metro links. Its 800G ZR and ZR Plus products target distances from tens to hundreds of kilometers, enabling high-capacity links between large sites.

$Lumentum (LITE.US)$ is another major supplier of high-speed optical components, from lasers to transceivers. It has teamed up with Marvell and Coherent to demonstrate 800G ZR modules for data center interconnect, a configuration that fits neatly with hyperscale AI traffic patterns.

$Fabrinet (FN.US)$ is a contract manufacturer focused on complex optical and RF assemblies. Recent commentary highlights its role in ramping 1.6 terabit transceivers and co-packaged optics projects for Nvidia's Blackwell Ultra platform.

$Lumen Technologies (LUMN.US)$ operates a global long-haul fiber network and is a Microsoft Azure Peering Service partner, helping enterprise customers connect into Azure from the nearest edge point of presence.

$Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI.US)$ makes optical transceivers for data centers and broadband networks. Microsoft has been a key customer for years, including a manufacturing agreement for lasers and more recently a strategic deal around active optical cables and 800G datacenter optics.

$POET Technologies (POET.US)$ is a smaller player developing silicon photonics platforms that aim to lower the cost of high-speed optical modules. It has positioned itself as an enabling technology for 800G and 1.6T modules, potentially serving module makers that sell into hyperscalers.

Power suppliers: feeding the super factory

None of this matters without reliable, mostly carbon-free electricity. Microsoft expects its Wisconsin Fairwater campus alone to draw tens of thousands of megawatt-hours per day, and has committed more than seven billion dollars of investment there through the end of the decade.

$WEC Energ Group Inc (WEC.US)$ , through its utility We Energies, is the local power provider in southeastern Wisconsin and a central player in how Microsoft's first Fairwater site connects to the grid. Local filings and reporting describe multi-billion-dollar plans for new generation to meet spiking data center demand, much of it driven by Microsoft's projects.

$American Electric Power (AEP.US)$ is a major US utility with large footprints in states that host current and planned hyperscale data centers, including facilities tied to Microsoft. Regulators and utilities in its territory are already wrestling with how to design special tariffs for energy-hungry AI campuses.

$Constellation Energy (CEG.US)$ is the largest operator of nuclear power plants in the United States. In 2024 it signed its largest-ever power purchase agreement with Microsoft, a 20-year deal to provide about 835 megawatts of carbon-free nuclear power and bring the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor back into service as the Crane Clean Energy Center.

$Brookfield (BN.US)$ , through Brookfield Renewable, signed a global framework agreement with Microsoft in 2024 to deliver more than 10.5 gigawatts of new renewable energy capacity between 2026 and 2030, the largest corporate clean-energy deal of its kind.

What it all adds up to

Microsoft's AI super factories are not just about one company building a big shiny data center. They are about a supply chain that stretches from GPU designers in California to fiber plants in North Carolina, optics factories in Thailand and Taiwan, and nuclear reactors in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

For investors, that means two layers of exposure. At the core are the obvious names: Microsoft and Nvidia. Around them sits a second ring of picks-and-shovels stocks across networking, optics, neocloud infrastructure and utilities. Some, like CoreWeave, IREN, Nebius, Corning and Constellation, already have Microsoft's name in their contract disclosures. Others are “probable beneficiaries” because they supply standard building blocks that look tailor-made for Fairwater-style AI campuses.

The hard part is valuation. Many of these stocks already price in years of AI growth, and revenue tied directly to Microsoft can be highly concentrated. For small investors, it helps to think in themes: decide whether you prefer relatively stable cash flows from power utilities, growth-heavy but customer-concentrated neoclouds, or high-beta optical and networking names that live at the bleeding edge of technology cycles.

@TigerStars  @CaptainTiger  @TigerWire  @Daily_Discussion  @Tiger_chat  @Tiger_comments  @MillionaireTiger