The Urban Frontier of AI

By 2050, 70% of the world will live in cities, and those cities will be powered by the data centers we build today. Far from being isolated in the periphery, 97.5% of US data centers are hidden in plain sight within urban centers, driven primarily by electricity-grid capacity. Drawing on research from the recently launched Urban Institute at NYU Tandon, Professor Maurizio Porfiri demonstrates how…