There are resources in society that are no longer in use. They once had value, but over time, as structures changed, they were forgotten, left behind, and left untouched. Vast tracts of land abandoned due to natural disasters or depopulation. Decommissioned power infrastructure. Obsolete telecom stations. Remote plots of land and tunnels no one visits anymore. These are resources left behind by shifting industrial structures—forgotten, but not gone.
If the structure changes again, these resources may take on new meaning. Especially in an era driven by computational power, these physical infrastructures can function as “foundations for computation.” There’s electricity. Land that can dissipate heat. Environments with high tolerance for noise. Cheap land and municipalities open to collaboration. Water sources and climates ideal for cooling. From a different perspective, these may have always been “ideal infrastructures.” It’s not that they lacked value—they simply hadn’t been redefined yet.
When urban depopulation accelerates and rural populations decline, we tend to assume that the value of those regions is lost. But I believe that’s a human-centered—and deeply arrogant—assumption. For AI and IoT, the presence of people is not essential. What matters is whether data can be collected, electricity is available, and there’s access to the internet. For them, the optimal environment isn’t necessarily the city. In fact, rural areas—less interference, more available power and space, and infrastructure that can be redesigned from scratch—might be “natural” habitats for AI and IoT. Just as wildflowers grow where human hands do not reach, it is in these quiet places that the information infrastructure of the future may take root.
In finance, Manhattan once served as a hub, and later, Singapore did too—each backed by policy, tax regimes, and geopolitical positioning. If “geographic advantage” takes on new meaning, then Japan’s rural regions still have a chance. Japan is a rule-of-law country with stable power infrastructure and a high degree of safety. From the standpoint of human-centric life, it may appear resource-poor, but if we look across the country with localized renewable energy in mind, these “low-value” areas could become ideal foundations for the next generation of infrastructure.
Modern computational infrastructure no longer needs to be concentrated in urban centers. In fact, to avoid the shortages of electricity, space, and cooling found in cities, it will spread outward—to the periphery, to rural regions. As this trend continues, the logic that “unused means worthless” will flip. Places once dismissed may now be rediscovered as the foundational base for computational resources—valuable precisely because no one else is using them.
And it’s not just resources being redefined. Entire regions can reclaim purpose by changing the scale of evaluation. Turning forgotten resources into assets is not simply about buildings or machinery—it marks a quiet update to the structure of society itself.