Elon Musk trolls Microsoft AI chief over 15-million-hour datacentre build claim

Microsoft

Elon Musk has taken aim at Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman after Suleyman boasted that the company’s new Fairwater datacentre in Atlanta required more than 15 million labour hours to build. Suleyman compared the effort to the construction of the Empire State Building, which he said took just 7 million labour hours. Musk’s response on X was cutting: “Are you sure you’re doing it right?”

Suleyman’s comment was meant to highlight the scale of Microsoft’s next-generation AI infrastructure, but it quickly drew ridicule. The contrast becomes sharper when weighed against Musk’s own track record. Last year, xAI reportedly built a massive data centre running 100,000 liquid-cooled Nvidia H100 GPUs in just 19 days, a feat that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang publicly praised. Huang described Musk as uniquely capable of executing large-scale engineering projects with speed, precision and resource coordination.

The exchange adds another layer to the ongoing friction between Musk and Microsoft. Musk has repeatedly criticised Microsoft’s growing influence over OpenAI, arguing that the company has turned the research lab into a closed, profit-driven arm of its business. He also expanded his lawsuit against OpenAI to include Microsoft, accusing the tech giant of steering the project too far from its founding mission.

Despite the tension, Musk made an unexpected appearance at Microsoft Build 2025, where he launched Grok 3 and Grok 3 Mini on the Azure AI Foundry platform. But the truce appears temporary. Musk continues to warn that Microsoft could be overtaken by the very AI systems it supports, recently calling the company’s OpenAI investment “insanely suicidal”.

Musk is also preparing his own long-term challenge to Microsoft through a new venture called Macrohard. Announced in August, the project aims to build a full competitor to Microsoft’s software ecosystem using AI alone. Musk argues that because Microsoft no longer manufactures hardware, the entire company could theoretically be simulated and replicated by AI systems. While details remain scarce, Grok AI is expected to sit at the centre of this effort.