AI's Urban Migration: Why Data Centers Are Moving Into Cities

AI infrastructure is undergoing a fundamental geographic shift, with major tech companies building data centers in or near urban areas despite higher costs and environmental concerns—a dramatic departure from the remote, power-rich locations that have dominated for decades. The movement is driven by a single technical reality: AI inference workloads, expected to exceed training by 2027, demand sub-20 millisecond latency that only urban placement can provide.