Why Data Centers Are Moving Downtown - And What That Means for Every City in America | Ep 26

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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 it.

Daniel is the Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Legacy Investing and he just acquired the former Chicago Board Options Exchange headquarters at 400 S. LaSalle Street to convert it into a 33-megawatt AI data center. The building sold for $12 million 16 months earlier. He's putting hundreds of millions more in equipment in without a single tenant signed.

That's not recklessness. That's a thesis.

In Episode 26 of the Quantum City Initiative Show, Greg sits down with Daniel to unpack why data centers are migrating from suburban campuses to NFL cities, why the building that launched electronic trading is now being rebuilt as AI infrastructure, and why the data center industry's biggest problem isn't power or latency — it's that we've built data centers that look like prisons.

There's also one idea in this episode that will reframe how you think about every building in your portfolio: data centers are not designed for people. They're designed for servers. And that distinction — something that sounds obvious — turns out to unlock an entirely new playbook for what to do with the office buildings no one else can figure out.

Also in this episode:

Data Centers as Civic Institutions: Every photo of your family, every iMessage, every digital memory you own lives in a data center. So why are we running political campaigns against them?

The AI Inference Explosion: Daniel explains why AI inference — the compute that powers your LLMs in real time — is expected to 10x in the next five years, and why that changes where data centers need to be located

The Amazon Package Analogy: The single clearest explanation of why data centers work exactly like logistics warehouses — and why that means more of them are coming to your downtown

The NFL City Rule: If your city has an NFL team, you're getting data centers.

The Minneapolis Proof of Concept: Legacy built an AI inference node on top of a mixed-use office tower in downtown Minneapolis — and nobody driving past it knows it's a data center

The Grid Is 100 Years Old: Daniel's historical argument for why the power conversation is being misframed — and why data centers may actually be the catalyst cities need to finally upgrade aging infrastructure

Data Centers in Space: Why this idea gets laughed at in every industry cocktail party Daniel attends (and why the maintenance problem is the real answer)



TIMESTAMPS
00:00 — Intro: Strata backstory, and the $1.1 trillion office problem
01:45 — Daniel's background: tech startups, going public, and the shift to infrastructure
03:35 — What is a data center? And why does everyone think they're prisons?
06:15 — The civic institution argument: your family photos live in a data center
08:05 — Data Centers Are Heading Downtown
09:55 — AI inference explained: the Amazon package analogy
13:05 — The NFL City rule: where data centers cluster and why
18:20 — Power and the grid: why the 100-year-old infrastructure argument changes everything
24:30 — Greg's snowstorm story and the moment you realize you take the grid for granted
26:40 — The CBOE building: vacant for four years, rats included, now being reinvented
30:45 — Why you can put servers in the middle of a 50,000 sq ft floor plate — and why humans won't go there
33:40 — Washington's role: zoning, policy, and why no one defined "data center" in building code until recently
38:10 — What Legacy looks for in a market
41:50 — Hottest data center markets
43:15 — Data centers in space
45:40 — Rapid Fire Segment