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

📊 Chart of the Week

🗺 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. 

📊 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

• RSVP

Coworking in the Arena 🏟️ (2 more open spots)

• Hosted by Drive Capital

• Tuesday

• RSVP

Financial Statement Analysis for Startups

• Hosted by Northwestern’s Querry InQbation Lab

• Wednesday

• RSVP

Inside the Loop Bi-weekly Coffee

• Hosted by ITL

• Thursday

• RSVP

AI Meetup (with AWS)

• Hosted by AWS

• Thursday

• RSVP

Creative AI: Brand Building

• Hosted by 1871

• Thursday

• RSVP

Early Stage Fundraising Trends

• Hosted by Bionic Labs and Carta

• Friday

• RSVP

👋 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.

🗞 Previous Editions of the Driver’s Seat

#44 - Chicago’s Founder Diversity

#43 - Chicago’s 24 Unicorns

#42 - The Rise of Midwest Hydrogen

#41 - Illinois Computing Chip Innovation

#40 - The History of the First Group Chat