Could rundown shopping malls become infrastructure platforms?
When department stores move out, can server farms move in?
As an infrastructure specialist, I have been watching two trends. One has been the reuse of suburban shopping malls into repurposed locations. Here is a great article on community building with former shopping centers. And the other has been about the need for a strong technology backbone for creating private sector innovation. It is clear for certain countries, like the US, there is a strong need for reinvestment so that the private sector can leverage this to catch up. And for this second one, I have been thinking about an index for major regional areas as to the availability of both compute power, broadband and communications structures as part of a livability index. This post is a bit of an academic view of the subject. I was thinking more along the lines of commercial viability for private businesses.
And then I stumbled across this interesting piece on Bloomberg on giving advice where to invest your money at present. This one equity firm is looking at the need for investment not only in tech bandwidth, but cold storage and other aspects of the supply chain model that tech supports.
Their point on where to focus for innovation is clear, which is the building and maintaining next-generation transportation and logistics, energy, and communications systems. One firm they discuss, Stonepeak Infrastructure Partners, invests in diverse infrastructure sectors in North America such as power and utilities, transport and logistics, water, midstream energy, and communications. This also includes cold storage, wireless towers, data centers, and satellite networks to serve rural geographies.
If we define the investment in infrastructure, underpinning our use of platforms both public and private, to include both the supply chain and underlying resources that we engage to use platforms, this focus on investment for innovation is quite interesting.
And I do not think shopping malls will make great server farms, given the energy requirement of a server farm. But I do think we can reuse the footprint of the abandoned malls as a regional communication or infrastructural hub for revitalizing local economies with the necessary infrastructure to rebuild local.