As its footprint in Iowa has grown, Microsoft has invested over $2.5 million in community programs across more than 70 partners in the Greater Des Moines area, most of them nonprofit organizations. The funding has supported tree planting in urban areas, financial and computer classes for immigrants and refugees, skilling and career development for underserved populations, and the Microsoft Datacenter Academy, a workforce development program for IT sector employment.
Since launching in 2018, the Microsoft Datacenter Academy has expanded to 12 locations in the United States, Europe and Asia. Microsoft works with local colleges to develop curriculum for the program and provides equipment for training labs, as well as scholarships, opportunities for mentoring and employment in Microsoft datacenters.
Geormain James-Turner, 23, was planning to study business and had little interest in or exposure to technology besides playing video games as a kid. But through his uncle, who runs a nonprofit organization in Des Moines that Microsoft supports, James-Turner learned about the Microsoft Datacenter Academy. He was offered a scholarship and decided to enroll.
James-Turner began taking academy classes at Des Moines Area Community College in early 2022 and is working toward earning several IT certifications. In December, he was hired at a Microsoft datacenter in West Des Moines and discovered that he enjoys the autonomy, problem-solving and active nature of the work, which doesn’t require him to sit at a desk all day. He is now thinking about where his future in technology could lead.
“I want to advance into cloud computing,” he said. “I love working at the datacenter, but I feel like there’s so much more to learn and so much potential.”
Infrastructure and a diversified workforce
Microsoft’s Iowa datacenters have created additional property tax valuation that has enabled the city of West Des Moines to undertake major street projects and utility improvements totaling around $182 million, according to city officials. The work has extended municipal infrastructure to areas around the city, opening up about 4,500 acres of land for future development.
“There have been public improvement projects that I never thought I’d see in my lifetime, let alone my tenure here with the city,” said Clyde Evans, who recently retired as West Des Moines’ director of community and economic development after 32 years with the city.
Evans pointed to an 8.5-mile extension of Veterans Parkway, which now serves as the spine of a major roadway system spanning two counties, and the construction of a fiber cable network to provide high-speed internet service to homes and businesses throughout West Des Moines.
While the infrastructure work was initially done for Microsoft’s datacenters, Mayor Russ Trimble said, it will also benefit the surrounding areas, and the costs for those improvements will be recouped in future years through property taxes paid by Microsoft.
“That’s critical infrastructure that we would have needed to pay for somehow, and we would have struggled to pay for that,” Trimble said. “The valuation generated from the Microsoft datacenters has allowed us to put in the infrastructure needed for the datacenters themselves, but it’s also provided needed infrastructure for the entire area.”
The added property tax valuation enabled a local school district to make major improvements to a high school and middle school without having to increase a tax levy to fund the work. Microsoft paid for a new water tower that expanded the city’s distribution system and also provided funding for a new amphitheater, Evans said.
Microsoft’s datacenters, Trimble said, are helping to diversify West Des Moines’ workforce and providing new opportunities in the tech sector.
“We are very reliant on banking, finance, insurance. It is great to be able to diversify our offerings here and have these high-tech jobs in our community,” Trimble said. “We are extremely proud to have Microsoft in our city. Microsoft has been an incredible corporate citizen.”
Advancing AI supercomputing
The supercomputing resources pioneered in Iowa will serve as a blueprint as Microsoft continues to expand its datacenter presence. Microsoft plans to build additional datacenters in the U.S. to train AI models, further advancing the company’s commitment to build new AI supercomputing capabilities to serve the public.
Lessons learned in developing supercomputing resources for AI training are also proving useful in advancing more distributed infrastructure that helps AI models analyze data and other information to generate outputs, a process known as inferencing. Pushing boundaries in Iowa has also helped Microsoft make similar Azure infrastructure optimized for AI model training available to other customers via Azure AI supercomputing capabilities in the cloud.
Meanwhile, Microsoft and OpenAI are continuing to work together to design more powerful Azure supercomputing systems to train increasingly complex models. But Iowa, Mayer said, has the distinction of being the place where the two companies’ pioneering work in supercomputing originated.
“As you think about the next wave of technological progress, it’s amazing that this power has really come from Iowa to a degree,” she said. “I think that’s something that should be part of the story in history.”
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Top image: Patience Mbi, a Microsoft Datacenter Academy student, works in a lab at Des Moines Area Community College that has equipment donated by Microsoft. Photo by John Brecher for Microsoft.