Struggling Cities Face More Pain From AI Boom
Well-paid tech workers will boost real estate in thriving regions, but other locales will suffer as companies get by with fewer employees.
Places such as Northern Virginia could benefit from the AI boom.
Photographer: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Artificial intelligence is likely to transform our world in many ways, but one that hasn’t received much attention is the technology’s looming impact on real estate. As AI becomes an essential component of both business and daily life, the value of places where those who work on AI want to live will rise, provided these locales have reasonable infrastructure. At the same time, the value of lower-tier cities left out of the AI boom will diminish.
One notable feature about artificial intelligence is that it can make many companies smaller. AI can do a lot of the work that previously would have required a large office staff. Not surprisingly, the companies that use AI best are AI companies themselves. Clearview, a facial-recognition company that has had a major impact on the war in Ukraine, has only 35 employees. OpenAI during the time when it developed GPT-4 had fewer than 300 workers. Anthropic, an OpenAI spinoff, has about 200 employees.