The Quantum City Show

Private data center construction is up $9 billion this year, while everything else in private construction is down $46 billion. Data centers are pretty much the only thing America is still building.   In episode 42 of The Quantum City Initiative Show, Greg Gomer and Chase Garbarino dig into what they're calling the Great Scarcity. Office construction in central business districts is down 61%, Aust...

The 10-year Treasury crossed 5% this week. Everyone blamed the Fed. The real reason was AI.   Fed Chair Kevin Warsh called the 10-year "the most important asset in the world," and this week we found out why. Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Oracle have issued about $225 billion in bonds this year, more than double all of 2025, just to keep building AI infrastructure. AI used to just pay the rent. Now i...

Over 60% of companies are planning to grow their headcount this year. You'd think that means real estate is booming. It means something else.   JLL's 2026 Future of Work survey polled more than 2,200 C-suite and real estate leaders across 21 countries, and yeah, headcount's going up. Dig deeper, though, and AI is making companies so efficient it's crushing lease length. More people, shorter commit...

The best month for commercial real estate transactions since 2005 just happened. Almost half of it wasn't really real estate. It was data centers.   MSCI's July capital trends report puts total CRE transaction volume at $75 billion, up 78% year over year. Great headline. Strip out the $34 billion that came from data centers, though, and the rest of the market (apartments, retail, office) is basica...

A 49-story, two-million-square-foot tower in Midtown Manhattan just went back to the bank. Not ideal.   When Kravath, the building's anchor tenant, packed up and left for a Brookfield address, SL Green's occupancy at Worldwide Plaza tanked and the property landed in receivership, bleeding $484,000 a month. And here's the kicker: nobody can even agree on what "occupancy" meant when this deal got un...

The federal government just became a landlord for artificial intelligence. Last week it handed a shuttered Cold War uranium plant, ground lease and all, over to Brookfield and NextEra. $100 billion committed. A 1.2 gigawatt data center on the way. No tenant named yet, which might be the smartest part of the whole deal. Meanwhile, two bridges connecting Massachusetts to Cape Cod need $4.5 billion a...

PJM Interconnection (the grid operator serving 67 million people across 13 states) went to market to buy power for 2028 and couldn't buy enough. So it did something no grid operator in America has done before: it told data centers in writing that if they don't bring their own power supply, it reserves the right to unplug them. Greg Gomer and Chase Garbarino unpack what that single sentence does to...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/ Dubai just launched a live digital twin of the entire city - 195,000 buildings, 1,500 geospatial data layers, and a real operating system running underneath it all. So why isn't every city doing this? In the dog days of summer, Greg and Chase dig into the widening gap between...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cit... Greg and Chase just got back from HqO's EMEA customer advisory board, and the money in commercial real estate is telling on itself. Last week Digital Realty bought Blackstone's stake in three Northern Virginia data centers for three and a half billion dollars. This episode follows that p...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/ AI in commercial real estate has moved from “we should probably look at this” to “why don’t we have a plan yet?” That was the feeling coming out of our CAB in Los Angeles. We had owners, operators, and executives from LPC, Hines, LBA, ARE, Piedmont, Swig, MetLife, and Hudson...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/ After years on the sidelines, the institutional giants are buying office again. SL Green, BXP, Vornado, and Nardis are back in the market, and Q1 2026 office investment sales hit $20.5 billion, up nearly 40% year over year. So is office finally back? Not exactly. Greg and Cha...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   China just opened the largest train station on earth. 1.2 million square meters. 7 years to build. LIDAR robots working three times faster than humans. Trains doing 220mph.   Boston took 17 years to extend 4.7 miles of Green Line. New York spent $5 billion on 1.8 miles of s...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/ 120 million square feet leased in Q1 2026. Best quarter in a decade. First time since before the pandemic that volume cleared its historical average.   So why does Class B still feel like a completely different market?   AI firms are signing massive leases. Trophy assets are...

  Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/ Back in February, the AI panic ripped through CRE stocks and everybody bled. CBRE, JLL, BXP, Newmark — absolutely hammered. The bear case was simple: AI was gonna “destroy” office demand, gut the brokerage business, and that was that. Q1 2026 earnings just came in. It wasn'...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/ If you've been watching office vacancy hit record highs while office leasing also hits record highs and wondering what is going on, this one's for you. Episode 28. We're back. And we have a lot to catch up on. The Microsoft-Chevron deal just told you everything you need to kn...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   We've been talking about what makes a quantum city for a while now. Rob is in the middle of building one. Rob Lair, co-founder of Hula Lakeside Investments, joined us this week and the conversation took on a life of its own.    Eight years ago, Rob and his partner Russ Scul...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: ⁠ ⁠ ⁠https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/⁠ 30% of office buildings in America are functionally obsolete. That's $1.1 trillion of commercial real estate sitting vacant, aging, and bleeding value. The question everyone is asking: what do you do with it? Daniel English has an answer. And he just bet $40 million on...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   When the AI panic hit Wall Street, the public markets went into an absolute whipsaw. Commercial real estate took one of its sharpest beatings in years - CBRE tumbled, JLL tumbled, and names like Newmark and BXP weren't far behind. The narrative? Investors were terrified tha...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   In this episode, we sit down with Dominic Endicott, author of "Knowledge Towns" and has been thinking about how secondary cities can win in a world where Silicon Valley takes everything.   One stand out point: real estate has $380 trillion in value but only $3 trillion in m...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/ In this episode, we talk with a guest who has shaped our thinking for years: Joe Pine.    Most know him as the author of The Experience Economy, but his newer work on The Transformation Economy is what we really wanted to dig into, especially given the "global AB test" the re...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   AI isn’t a future concept anymore. It’s the infrastructure the economy is running on, and it’s starting to show up in places that feel very real, very physical, and sometimes very uncomfortable. Cities, energy systems, offices, and the buildings we keep arguing about all se...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   In this episode, we’re joined by Marwan Aboudib, partner at Tekuma (Tekuma Frenchman Urban Design), to talk through what it really takes to build cities for the future. Drawing from his work across global markets, Marwan shares how city-making actually happens when vision m...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   In this episode, we’re joined by Steve from the MIT Center for Real Estate, and we get into a real conversation about PropTech, AI, and what’s actually real versus what’s just hype. No sci-fi, no robots delivering buildings, just how this stuff is really showing up in comme...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   We’re back for the first episode of the year, and instead of pretending we have crystal-clear answers for 2026, we do what we do best: zoom out, look at the data, and call out what actually feels different this time.    2025 was loud, messy, and very AI-heavy, so we start t...

Powered by HqO - Learn more and join the Quantum City Initiative here: https://www.hqo.com/the-future-of-cities-begins-now/   Social media bans, AI data centers, and real estate signals—what a week.   Australia’s move to ban social media for teens and why the feed is starting to look like “digital cigarettes,” plus the debate over an age “sweet spot” for social platforms.   We jump to SpaceX’s pot...