TOKYO, April 9 (Reuters) - Microsoft ( MSFT ) said on

Tuesday it would invest $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 ( AMZN ) cloud unit is investing

$10 billion in Mississippi

and another

$5.3 billion in Saudi Arabia

towards data centers in those regions. Google is

building

a data center just outside London for $1 billion.

Microsoft's ( MSFT ) Azure, Alphabet-unit Google Cloud and Amazon

Web Services are the top three cloud computing companies in the

world.