Dear Fellow CRE professionals. We tend to be resistant to change and new tech, but for the physical AI wave, please embrace it early.
I’ve spent a few weeks in Asia (Taipei, Hong Kong, Guangzhou). AI is seen more positively. The major shopping malls have at least one “AI store.” The mall at Canton Tower had like three.
One was geared towards kids: AI enabled tablets for kids kind of like LeapFrog; they had a chess and Go board game machine (really cool, where the robot plays chess with you - we beat the robot! I can see this being everywhere in 5 years).
The other was a luggage on wheels that turned into a scooter. That cost $400 US dollars. The store had the words robotics in the name which caught my eye.
The third store was actually a showcase store near the Tower. It was set up like an Apple Store. 3D printer in the corner. Robot pet dog that talks to you. A dancing robot that was center stage. News camera crew interviewing foreign tourist on their impression. And the chess robot that we paid 20 RMB ($3) to play against for 20 mins. We beat the robot, but playing it was very enjoyable.
I can see robots creeping into our lives. The Hilton hotel we were staying at had food delivery robots. They look similar to the robots you see at some sushi restaurants that deliver waters and utensils to tables. They go up elevators to the secure hotel guest floors to deliver take out (delivery guy just leaves in lobby). These robots don’t really wait for you to get out of the elevator. They barge rigtt by in. They are on a mission.
While we debate about LLMs and all that, we are missing the point that this tech is coming, especially obvious to me on the physical AI side.
And this is very exciting for CRE professionals because we understand location, space planning for humans and in the future robots, there are new industries coming.
I write this because in the West, we are villainizing AI and robots. My kids have a negative reaction to AI. Meanwhile in China, kids are being encouraged to use it. I think for our competitive sakes, we need to have more things like these stores and showcase pop-ups, to show use cases that the future is coming and some of it isn’t so scary.
I highly, highly recommend you look beyond LLMs for this wave and for our societies to better showcase positive use cases that will encourage use and early adoption for the sake of staying competitive with China. They are kicking our butt right now on that front. I also believe minds can change quite easily once they experience (same thing with online shopping, ride sharing, vacation rentals, autonomous vehicles). Keep an open mind.
And for those with career ambitions, the world of asset intensity is getting wider and wider to apply your real estate (asset intensity) skill sets and strategies to new, emerging fields. Now is a very exciting time if you can envision this future.
Yeah tablets for kids have zero negative associations or impacts on cognitive development. If the Chinese want to rot their kids’ brains and stunt their development, more power to them.
No one is villainizing robotics anyhow. Stop trying to associate the slop machine with actually productive technology.
Not going to reply to a troll
Sorry for being short with you. Hard to tell if you were trolling. I was just frustrated that my message about being open minded about physical AI is getting sucked into the endless criticisms that just suck all the air away from the big picture.
I don’t care one way or the other about tablets and kids. I care that Chinese kids are learning to work with these future tech more than kids in the West. I also don’t think the kids in China or Taiwan are studying or learning any less than before.
Physical AI will need more data centers (that should end the debate of whether data centers are a fad). I just got on a plane in Hong Kong with just facial recognition as my ticket to board. Things are changing whether we like it or not.
Just left Asia and back to the US.
- I am less concerned about a US-China conflict over Taiwan, mainly because of how costly it was to fight a war against drones in the middle of maritime trade routes (Iran). The last large scale amphibious landing was the Incheon Landing during the Korean War, and that was a surprise attack in the 1950’s. Not possible today. Just 6 months ago, I thought Taiwan was the greatest geopolitical risk of my remaining lifetime.
- I have great admiration for Guangdong people (Southern China). They made up 70% of the Chinese immigrants around the world and they powered the rise of manufacturing in China.
I had dinner with a successful Guangzhou real estate developer turned business school professor and financier (helps companies go public). He’s around 60 years old. I asked him a somewhat provocative question, “what stage of life are you in” and his reply “make more money.” The culture of making more money just blew my mind (me with a family, I had been looking to slow down). The other thing he mentioned, when he’s teaching his business school class he said he holds up a simple teacup and asks the class to ask questions. Usually he gets like two questions. It’s a cup! What more to ask? It’s not just Chinese students, but many others that “information is knowledge, but asking the right questions is wisdom.” I think it is important as students but also professionals to think deductively. We can work on that, even with thinking about our own careers in real estate. For example the Guangzhou real estate developer who is a professor and helps companies go public. There is much we can do beyond working on buildings in our careers.
I am glad that a vistor had such an impressive reflection for a visit in China. As a Chinese born and originally from Shenzhen/Guangzhou, I would say the culture in Canton,aka Guangdong is totally different from other provinces in China. You can learn that as a West Coast vs. East Coast in the US.
I am glad that a visitor had such an impressive experience in China. As someone born in China, originally from Shenzhen and Guangzhou, I would say that the culture in Guangdong (one of the provinces in southern China) is completely different from that in other provinces. It's similar to the difference between the West Coast and the East Coast in the US.
AI could definitely be a driver for the whole world, and both the US and China have invested heavily to boost development. However, I have yet to see any profitable avenues arising from AI usage. A dancing robot or a pet dog merely showcases engineering advancement. Given the current high unemployment rate (30%+ for graduates within one year of graduation), robots and autonomous vehicles cannot be a driver for China.
While it is helpful to educate children with AI products, the side effects are obvious: more and more people will depend on the output of LLMs, meaning they will lose the ability to think critically.
For the professor story, it's a great change from developer, as the collapse has been five years since the rollout of the 3-Redline policy. I am also curious how he could facilitate financing in such a difficult environment.
If you look at the skyline of Shenzhen, China it is crazy. Going from a population of 300,000 in 1980 to 18 million in 2026. Want to know where globally priced building commodities and capital are going? Places like Shenzhen, and other high growth developing places.
Makes me think about different real estate cycles and country cycles. I’ve been to China several times in the past, and the real estate growth story was urbanization. Folks going from the countryside and moving to the urban cities. That investment thesis, risk adjusted seemed pretty money.
But a couple things, I was talking to some Chinese. The cities became more expensive to live in and the rural vs urban quality of life started to have parity. That equilibrium started to (I believe/guess since I’m not a China expert) in the slowing of the urbanization trade. So called “ghost cities” is one such outcome, overbuilding.
But in 2026, Shenzhen is growing as the tech city of China. I think it is the “cannibalization” phase where cities become specialized, and magnets for certain types of growth. The US has some of that with Silicon Valley. It’s just interesting seeing another country’s Silicon Valley being built.
Still, if you can find a developing country still in the early to mid stages of the urbanization phase, invest as much as you can (until the rural quality of life catches up, that is).
I got DM’d about physical AI and how CRE professionals could position themselves for that. I’m still thinking about it.
Thanks! Happy to share info as a Chinese!
Thank you. This technology is going to change the world. LLMs are just the beginning. The hardware space is moving fast even in America, and will touch fields like autonomous devices, healthcare, and more.
This week Midjourney, an already profitable AI image-generation company, released a medical device that uses AI to 3D map your body 10x cheaper and 100x faster than an MRI. Technology like this will help people catch diseases like cancer earlier and will prolong lives.
Autonomous vehicles are basically already here. Anyone who's driven in a Cybertruck or Waymo knows this. This same technology will power humanoid robots that will skyrocket our productivity.
These are very, very exciting times. AI doomers like @Ozymandia @CRE @IsItREPE will be caught with their mouths open.
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