Microsoft is putting another $700 million toward its data center infrastructure in the Midwest, expanding its presence in Iowa to help support the growth of services including Xbox Live and Office 365.
According to the Des Moines Register, Microsoft has been revealed as the company behind a large data center project in West Des Moines, known as “Project Mountain.” The identity of the company behind the project had previously been kept secret. The initiative will bring Microsoft’s total data center investment in the state to more than $1 billion.
Microsoft tells the newspaper that the expansion will be used to support “the growing demand for Microsoft’s cloud services.”
The company said previously that it would be backing Xbox Live for Xbox One with some 300,000 servers as it attempts to shift to a cloud-based model for the console. That was before the company relented on the online policies for the console, but Microsoft still clearly has a big requirement for new data center capacity.
AllThingsD notes that Google and Facebook have also been investing heavily in data centers in Iowa.
