What we build for AI will quietly reshape how we live with it.

We talk about AI models and breakthroughs but the real story might be unfolding under our feet, in the infrastructure we’re quietly building.

Every so often, a piece stops you in your tracks.

In the Financial Times, Waldemar Szlezak (Global Head of Digital Infrastructure at KKR) compares today’s explosion of AI investment to the dawn of electricity. When Edison first lit a single block of Manhattan in 1882, the real revolution wasn’t just the light bulb, it was the grid beneath it.

Szlezak argues we’re living through the same kind of moment now. Billions are flowing into data centres, energy capacity, and grid connectivity. There will be overshoots and shakeouts, he says — just as there were with the railways or the dot-com boom but the infrastructure will endure. Even if some investors fall, the systems they build will power the next century.

And he’s right. But that’s not the whole story.

⚙️ Beyond CapEx and Kilowatts

Data centres aren’t just sheds full of servers, they’re new civic landmarks, drawing power, land, and policy attention.

• Where they rise (and who owns them) will decide which regions thrive.
• Their hunger for energy and water will test every grid, every planning department.
• The data that fuels them comes from all of us, from our lives, our patterns, our choices, yet its governance still sits behind private walls.

This isn’t just an infrastructure story. It’s a societal story about who benefits from intelligence at scale, and who gets left behind.

🧭 A Different Kind of Infrastructure Question

If the nineteenth century asked, how do we connect markets? and the twentieth asked, how do we connect people? then the twenty-first must ask, how do we connect intelligence ethically, equitably, and sustainably?

The challenge for policymakers, councils, and communities isn’t just to “keep up” with AI but to shape the grid beneath it, the systems of trust, energy, and access that determine whether this revolution serves us all or just a few.

💭 I’m curious how others see this from a local government or civic innovation perspective. What role should councils and public agencies play in shaping the AI grid, not just using the technology, but governing the infrastructure beneath it?