Artificial Intelligence: Microsoft Announces Major Investment in Sweden

IT giant Microsoft is investing $3.21 billion dollars in Sweden over the next two years to develop artificial intelligence technology. At the same time, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure in the Nordic country will be strengthened. As Redmont Technology Group reported, “this is the largest investment Microsoft has made in Sweden to date.” The announcement was made during a conversation in Stockholm between Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson and Microsoft CEO Brad Smith.

Microsoft’s program includes a commitment to help train 250,000 people, equivalent to 2.4% of Sweden’s entire population, to “enable them to acquire artificial intelligence skills and thereby increase Sweden’s competitiveness in this rapidly growing sector.”

“This announcement goes beyond technology. It’s a commitment to providing broad access to the tools and skills that Swedish people and economies need to thrive in the age of artificial intelligence,” said Brad Smith.

As part of the two-year funding program, Microsoft intends to install 20,000 state-of-the-art graphics processing units (GPUs) in its Sandviken, Gavle, and Staffanstorp data centers in Sweden. A graphics processor is an electronic circuit capable of performing mathematical calculations at a very high speed. Computational tasks, such as graphics rendering and machine learning (ML), which enable the functioning of artificial intelligence and video editing, require applying similar mathematical operations to a large dataset. The architecture of the graphics processor allows it to perform the same operation on multiple data values in parallel. This improves processing efficiency for many resource-intensive tasks.