Report
Who Pays For The New Downtown?
Office conversion can create housing. Cities still need to know what their incentives buy, and who keeps the value they add.
Research theme
Advanced Technology
How technology reshapes markets, institutions, and power.
We examine where frontier capability is concentrating, which inputs constrain growth, and when adoption creates operating advantage.
- 3.4%US R&D intensityGross R&D spending, share of GDP
- 2.6%China R&D intensityGross R&D spending, share of GDP
- 24.3%US high-tech exportsShare of manufactured exports
What we study
Compute
Accelerators, data centers, and power.
Artificial Intelligence
Models, deployment, and adoption.
Automation
Robotics, automation, and factories.
Regulation
Export controls, antitrust, standards.
What we believe
Technology is increasingly the engine of growth and the accelerant of risk.
The constraint on artificial intelligence is moving from model capability to the physical plant required to run it: fab capacity, electricity, data centers, transmission, and the capital that pays for all of it. Nvidia's margins and the hyperscalers' capital budgets are the evidence. The contest is now over who can turn capital expenditure into lower computing cost, higher utilization, and recurring revenue.
Capital intensity is rising.
The AI buildout now resembles railroads and electrification, with the same dependence on cheap capital and the same exposure when it is withdrawn.
Adoption helps determine how widely innovation creates value.
The United States leads at the frontier and is losing ground at the deployment layer, where open weights, local hosting, and enterprise adoption decide who captures the productivity.
Technology policy is becoming industrial policy.
Export controls, chip subsidies, and grid access jointly shape where AI capacity can grow.
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Who Pays For The New Downtown?
Office conversion can create housing. Cities still need to know what their incentives buy, and who keeps the value they add.
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Key questions
Where will the next wave of compute capacity be built?
When does AI create measurable productivity gains at scale?
Which inputs become binding constraints?
How does technological capability translate into national power?