Kaufman & Company has unveiled BUILD 2030, a national development initiative that unites its housing, real estate, construction, technology, and AI infrastructure operations under a single investment and development strategy. The announcement, made in Los Angeles, highlights a growing recognition that the next wave of American infrastructure will be shaped as much by data centers and computing capacity as by traditional roads and bridges—and that housing must be part of that equation.
The initiative rests on a straightforward premise: the country needs significantly more places for people to live and more computing infrastructure to support an AI-driven economy. Kaufman & Company intends to participate in both. "Everyone is talking about the AI infrastructure boom, but infrastructure cannot only be about machines," said Daniel Kaufman, Founder and Principal of Kaufman & Company. "If we’re going to build infrastructure for AI, we should be equally serious about building infrastructure for people."
BUILD 2030 will coordinate projects and investment across the Kaufman platform, which includes operating companies in residential development, build-to-rent, workforce and affordable housing, custom housing, commercial and hospitality development, AI infrastructure, real estate advisory, and venture capital. The strategy leverages more than 25 years of development experience, representing over $2 billion in project value and more than 10,000 housing units developed.
Central to the initiative is what Kaufman calls "infrastructure convergence." Housing requires land, power, transportation, entitlement expertise, construction capacity, and capital—many of the same inputs needed for AI infrastructure. Kaufman believes developers who understand both physical and digital infrastructure will have a significant advantage in the coming decade. "The real estate industry still tends to put everything into separate boxes: multifamily, build-to-rent, affordable housing, data centers, technology," Kaufman said. "We don’t see it that way. We see land, infrastructure, housing, technology and capital increasingly colliding. BUILD 2030 is our response to that."
The initiative also emphasizes community impact. Rather than treating data centers as isolated industrial projects, Kaufman & Company plans to explore opportunities where infrastructure investment can support broader economic development, including workforce housing, community improvements, and local employment. "We don’t want to be the developer that arrives in a community, consumes power and leaves behind a box," Kaufman said. "The better model is to ask what else our investment can unlock for the people who already live there."
Kaufman & Company’s existing platform spans residential and mixed-use development, workforce and affordable housing, build-to-rent communities, hospitality, AI infrastructure, and a venture portfolio developing technology for the real estate industry. BUILD 2030 will serve as the connective strategy across those businesses as the company evaluates its next generation of projects and partnerships. "We’ve spent 25 years building real estate," Kaufman said. "The next 25 will be about building the infrastructure around it."
The announcement matters because it challenges the conventional separation of housing and technology infrastructure at a time when both are in critical demand. By integrating AI infrastructure with housing development, Kaufman & Company is betting that the most successful developments will be those that serve both digital and human needs—a model that could influence how other developers approach large-scale projects and community engagement.
