Who should cities be designed for?
Until recently, the obvious answer was “for humans.”
But today, the foundational function of cities is shifting from serving people to hosting computational resources.
Cities won’t be shaped by where people gather.
The next cities will emerge where AI functions best.
Once you accept that premise, the requirements completely change.
Disaster resilience. Surplus energy. Flexible land use. Logical handling of heat, airflow, and cooling.
These are infrastructures optimized not for human comfort, but for AI operation.
Take immersion-cooled edge data centers, for example.
They can be installed outdoors and still operate stably even when internal temperatures approach 40°C.
They can use underground water circulation, or combine solar and wind power for energy self-sufficiency.
Though physically located at the edges of urban space, they become central to urban function.
Such distributed infrastructure is best suited not to the core of traditional cities, but to areas previously labeled “undeveloped.”
Empty lots. Parking spaces. Unbuildable slopes. Abandoned farmland.
Places once considered useless are becoming ideal environments for AI to inhabit.
And what’s installed in these places isn’t an office for people.
It’s a facility for AI.
Not a city where people gather to work, but a city where AI runs and generates economic activity.
The logic of urban design is starting to shift.
Elon Musk said he wants to turn every parking lot into a park. We’d rather put AI there.
Infrastructure is no longer just for humans.
It must be redesigned for AI.
This isn’t about AI optimizing humans.
It’s about AI optimizing its own environment for efficient operation, and us following that logic in how we shape space.
What cities need now is not concrete.
They need electricity—and a philosophy of distributed autonomy.