Microsoft said it is “slowing or pausing” some of its data center construction, including a $1 billion project in Ohio, the latest sign that the demand for artificial intelligence technology that drove a massive infrastructure expansion might not need quite as many powerful computers as expected. The tech giant confirmed this week that it is halting early-stage projects on rural land it owns in central Ohio’s Licking County, outside of Columbus, and will reserve two of the three sites for farmland. “In recent years, demand for our cloud and AI services grew more than we could have ever anticipated and to meet this opportunity, we began executing the largest and most ambitious infrastructure scaling project in our history,” said Noelle Walsh, the president of Microsoft’s cloud operations, in a post on LinkedIn.