- The Driver's Seat
- Posts
- 📶 Inside Chicago Data Centers
Welcome to the 45th edition:
I had a great time speaking with the MBAi class at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.
MBAi is a new program at NW that guides students towards using AI to solve business challenges. 👇🏽
Fun fact: one of Northwestern’s Intro to AI courses has 230 students enrolled this semester, up from 30 students a year ago. There’s so much excitement for AI taking place on university campuses in Chicago.
📍 Today’s Lineup:
📶 Inside Chicago Data Centers
đź“Š Chart of the Week
đź—ş 7 Events Around the City
🔙 Previous Editions of the Driver’s Seat
📶 Inside Chicago Data Centers
Data Centers and Deep Learning
Data centers provide infrastructure to handle massive processing demands for deep learning models.
Anytime you ask ChatGPT a question, it may seem like magic, but behind the scenes there's a vast network of data centers working endlessly.
These facilities house powerful storage systems that process and analyze vast amounts of data at incredible speeds.
The Chicago Market
Chicago is the third largest data center market in the US, housing over 104 centers and a 7% vacancy rate (prompting a shift of many centers to the outskirts of the city)
We became a "tier one" data center hub in 2022 when we saw an 83% surge in development thanks to state incentives drawing over $4.2B in investments and creating over 8,000 jobs.
Chicago is an attractive hub for many reasons including our lower costs for power, industry leading decarbonization efforts, a cooler climate, and central location that reduces the risk of natural disasters.
Chicago’s History with Data
Chicago was the first city to offer publicly available data.
The City of Chicago’s open data portal was created to provide access to city data, much of which has contributed to training data for deep learning models.
In 2014, Chicago pioneered an open-source platform called SmartData which was the first municipal-level predictive analytics platform.Â
đź“Š Chart of the Week
Chicago was the top non-coastal city for new founders in January 2024. 👇🏽
This is great especially considering that startup salaries tend to stretch much further in cities like Chicago compared to SF and NYC.
🗺️ 7 Events Around The City
Chicago People Who are Building
Hosted by Pie App
Tuesday
Coworking in the Arena 🏟️ (2 more open spots)
Hosted by Drive Capital
Tuesday
Financial Statement Analysis for Startups
Hosted by Northwestern’s Querry InQbation Lab
Wednesday
Inside the Loop Bi-weekly Coffee
Hosted by ITL
Thursday
AI Meetup (with AWS)
Hosted by AWS
Thursday
Creative AI: Brand Building
Hosted by 1871
Thursday
Early Stage Fundraising Trends
Hosted by Bionic Labs and Carta
Friday
đź‘‹ See you next week!
Follow me on Twitter and Instagram for even more Chicago startup news and photos of my favorite restaurants in the city.
The Chicago Tech Scene Navigator: an up-to-data encyclopedia for Windy City founders. Enjoy.
bullishonchicago(dot)com
bullishonchicago.com
— Landon (@landon20s)
Dec 23, 2023