TOKYO Microsoft said on Tuesday it would invest US$2.9 billion over two years to expand its cloud and AI infrastructure in Japan, the latest in a series of overseas expansions by large tech firms to support the development of artificial intelligence.

The investment - the company's largest in the 46 years of its operations in the country - will also go towards skilling three million people in AI and setting up a Microsoft Research Asia lab in Tokyo.

Server operators are expanding their data centers and cloud computing assets globally to support a boom in AI applications and workloads, after the late 2022 launch of ChatGPT.

Amazon.com's cloud unit is investing US$10 billion in Mississippi and another US$5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia towards data centres in those regions. Google is building a data centre just outside London for US$1 billion.

Microsoft's Azure, Alphabet-unit Google Cloud and Amazon Web Services are the top three cloud computing companies in the world.

  - Reuters