In cities across America, the familiar outline of office towers and shopping malls is giving way—not to new shops or workplaces, but to silent, humming data centers. This hidden infrastructure boom is quietly reshaping both our skylines and our society.
The Digital Economy’s Real Estate Shift
Today, the US spends almost as much building data centers as it does building offices. It’s not just because data centers are a basic part of our infrastructure.
This shift represents a growing trend that's both obvious and easily ignored. Advances in exponential technologies are causing the virtual workforce to outpace the physical one, fundamentally shifting how and where productivity happens.
Data center investment is on track to overtake that of office buildings, signaling a fundamental redefinition of economic productivity.
via voronoi
From Desks to Racks: Rethinking Productivity
As of June 2024, 34 million Americans worked remotely—a figure that highlights how deeply work habits have changed. For extra context, half of those 34 million are entirely remote. Even as hybrid and in-office work gradually recover, office vacancies remain historically high.
via Statista
While I still prefer being in an office and connecting with employees and partners, this does raise important questions about the state of productivity, labor, capital, and land.
As economic output becomes increasingly digital, we must ask: How much work will soon be handled entirely by AI agents, independent of both physical offices and remote workers?
For cities, this shift means rethinking energy grids, job distribution, and urban planning priorities.
Offices once defined our cities and daily rhythms ... we built subways, downtown cores, cafés, and restaurants around them. People moved to the city to have better access to opportunities. They even dictated what we wore to work.
Now, data centers are taking that role. They will impact our energy grids, water usage, land use, and even global relations. Largely invisible in daily life, yet quietly directing our futures.
How will our physical landscapes evolve as digital realities become the core drivers of economic life?
Malls As a Portent of Change
For many, shopping malls were once the heart of community life. Now, their quiet halls reflect broader economic and social changes. Historically, malls defined social life and commerce. It’s where families did a lot of their shopping, it’s where you went to the movies, or kept in touch with trends, and it’s where we hung out on weekends when we had nowhere else to be.
Even my children grew up with malls as a central part of their experience. But today, malls look entirely different.
The rise of online shopping hollowed out many of America’s malls. As e-commerce grew, foot traffic declined, leaving behind cavernous buildings that no longer justified their original purpose. Anchor tenants vanished, food courts emptied, and the very concept of the mall as a social and commercial center began to unravel.
Many malls have closed down, while others have changed their models, and some remain mostly empty, eking out a survival through continued investment.
Yet, hope remains. Some malls are reinventing themselves as mixed-use complexes, serving the evolving needs of their communities with features such as medical centers, schools, or co-working spaces.
Looking ahead, malls could be repurposed as community assets, such as affordable housing, cultural venues, green indoor parks, or even data centers. The bones of these buildings remain; it’s the imagination behind their reuse that will determine their second life.
In time, we’ll have to consider the same consequences for downtowns, office parks, and potentially even city planning.
The change is inevitable. With the increasing use of AI comes a greater need for data centers. More data centers also make AI more accessible to teenagers with innovative ideas, small entrepreneurs, and agentic businesses. It’s a snowball effect that we don’t yet truly understand, including its promise and peril.
The Road Ahead: Adapting to Digital Normalcy
I find it exciting. Office spaces aren’t going away. The need to gather people and work together as a collective will always be present. It’s the same with the concept of “downtown”.
The places once filled with shoppers, workers, and daily commutes are giving way to spaces filled with servers—quietly sustaining the new economy. As technology continues to change where and how we live, our ability to adapt will shape not just skylines, but what’s possible for communities everywhere.
I’m excited to see what else becomes “normal” in the next 20 years as our lifestyles and needs continue to evolve.
It never gets old to say ... but we live in interesting times!
