DETROIT – The sound and speed of the Detroit Grand Prix return to city streets in three weeks.

“Racing is in our blood. It’s in our DNA,” event chairman Bud Denker said.

Entering its fourth year downtown, the race hosts the NTT IndyCar Series and IMSA WeatherTech SportsCar Championship from May 29 through May 31.

“We’re not here once every 15 or 20 years like the Super Bowl or the Draft or Final Four,” Denker continued. “This event happens in our city every single year. You can plan on it.”

Racing up Franklin Street and down Jefferson Avenue, drivers can always count on a challenge from the nine-turn, 1.7-mile circuit.

“One little error and you’re going to hit a wall and end your day,” five-time Belle Isle winner and Cadillac Wayne Taylor Racing sports car driver Jordan Taylor said. “It takes a lot of risk. It takes a lot of commitment. The car has to be fast. This is one of those events where you need everything to go right.”

The Chevrolet Detroit Grand Prix presented by Lear took the green flag for the first time in 1982 as a Formula One event, transitioning to IndyCar/CART in 1989.

Through layout and location changes, the event continues to reflect the city’s culture.

“Energy, warmth, and sense of togetherness make the Detroit Grand Prix special,” Reden Le said. A student at the College for Creative Studies, Le designed the poster for this year’s race. “Working on this poster made me actually see how the community in Detroit is so diverse and so fun.”

The fun includes concerts, festivities, and promotions adjacent to the track throughout race week, along with documented economic and charitable impacts.

“We love racing for all those reasons,” General Motors Vice President of Performance and Motorsports Jim Campbell said. “Certainly, to have a race in our hometown means a lot, and it’s also a great way to give back.”

Approximately 1,350 volunteers sign up with the Detroit Grand Prix Association each year, but community assistance goes both ways.

“We put thousands of people to work,” Denker added. “We bring 100 million dollars to the city every year, and we show off these kids.”

Members of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Detroit created seven murals adorning the wall to the right side of the pit lane exit.

Serving as a clear reminder of the community that makes this race what it is, they’re also tough for drivers to see at speeds in excess of 180 miles per hour.

“We’re one of only 20 cities in the world that have a downtown street course event,” Denker said. “We should never take that for granted.”

The track build has already begun, with most construction occurring at night to avoid disrupting traffic.

Friday, May 29, is Fifth Third Free Prix Day, welcoming fans to grandstands one and nine with no ticket required.

Reserved seats for all three days are on sale now.

In his first press conference to discuss on-court basketball matters with the Milwaukee Bucks, one in which the organization introduced Taylor Jenkins as its new head coach on May 6, co-owner Jimmy Haslam didn’t waste any time in providing a bit of clarity with the direction of the franchise the Haslam Sports Group bought into in 2023.

Haslam, who said he anticipates being around the Bucks more often going forward, flatly stated the team will decide either trade superstar Giannis Antetokounmpo or continue to build the team around him by the NBA draft, which will be held June 23-24.

It was a stark departure from the last calendar year, when the organization and locker room navigated through a consistent barrage of trade speculation about the two-time Most Valuable Player.

“I just think before the draft is a natural time, right, because if Giannis does play somewhere else we ought to get a lot of assets,” Haslam said. “And that’s [general manager] Jon [Horst’s] job to do. And if he’s here, you build the team differently.”

Haslam then took a beat to add, without a prompt, “I just want to stress though, that our relationship with him – despite what is reported by certain ESPN writers – is very positive.”

Questions about Antetokounmpo’s future with the organization didn’t entirely dominate Jenkins’ reintroduction to Milwaukee, as the former Bucks assistant and Memphis Grizzlies head coach was able to lay out some aspects of his vision for the team, his partnership with Horst and how he seeks to re-establish a winning culture.

The building at 1001 Third Avenue South in downtown Minneapolis used to be an office. Now it is a data centre, and its anchor tenant is not a Silicon Valley hyperscaler but Core42, the cloud and AI infrastructure subsidiary of Abu Dhabi’s G42 Group. The lease, reported by Bloomberg on Wednesday, covers 20 megawatts of capacity in a facility converted from commercial office space by Legacy Investing, a Virginia-based developer that has spent more than 70 million dollars transforming the property. The deal is a small piece of a much larger pattern: the UAE’s most ambitious AI company is building a network of American data centres while simultaneously constructing the largest AI compute facility outside the United States, and the buildings it is filling were, until recently, home to the kind of white-collar workers whose jobs AI is designed to replace.

The tenant

G42, led by CEO Peng Xiao and backed by Abu Dhabi’s national security adviser Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, has become the UAE’s principal vehicle for AI infrastructure investment. The company is building the Stargate UAE campus, the international flagship of the 500 billion dollar Stargate joint venture between OpenAI, SoftBank, Oracle, and Abu Dhabi sovereign investment vehicle MGX, across approximately 19 square kilometres of desert south of Abu Dhabi. The first phase, a 200 megawatt compute cluster powered by Nvidia Grace Blackwell GB300 systems, is scheduled to come online by the end of 2026, with full build-out designed to reach one gigawatt of capacity at a projected cost exceeding 30 billion dollars. The project has already attracted geopolitical threats, with Iran warning of retaliatory strikes against Gulf infrastructure including commercial data centres.

Core42’s US expansion extends well beyond Minneapolis. The company signed a ten-year lease with TeraWulf for more than 70 megawatts of data centre infrastructure at the Lake Mariner facility in upstate New York, with an option for an additional 135 megawatts. G42 has also announced a one billion dollar data centre investment in Vietnam and established Core42’s European headquarters in Dublin. The Minneapolis lease adds a relatively modest 20 megawatts to a portfolio that is scaling globally, but its significance lies less in the capacity than in the location: a converted office building in the centre of an American city whose downtown vacancy rate, like those of most mid-sized US cities, has climbed steadily since the pandemic.

The conversion

Legacy Investing acquired 1001 Third Avenue South in 2019 and has since invested heavily in converting the six-storey property from office to data centre use. The company spent more than 70 million dollars on improvements in 2025 alone, expanding the building’s capacity from approximately two megawatts to 21 megawatts. In January 2026, Cloud Capital and Bahrain-based asset manager Arcapita acquired the property for 235 million dollars through a joint venture, reflecting the premium that data centre conversions now command over traditional office valuations.

The economics of office-to-data-centre conversion have become compelling enough to reshape urban real estate markets. US utilities plan to spend 1.4 trillion dollars by 2030 to power the AI boom, and the demand for data centre capacity has outstripped the supply of purpose-built facilities. Converting existing office buildings offers developers a faster path to market than ground-up construction, provided the building’s structural load capacity, power infrastructure, and cooling systems can be upgraded to support the density of modern compute hardware. Not every office qualifies. The buildings that do, typically those with reinforced concrete construction, proximity to fibre networks, and access to sufficient electrical capacity, have become some of the most sought-after properties in commercial real estate.

The pattern

G42’s American data centre strategy reflects a broader shift in how sovereign AI ambitions are materialising in the United States. The company is not simply building compute capacity abroad. It is establishing a physical presence inside the American power grid, the American fibre network, and American commercial real estate markets. The Minneapolis lease, the TeraWulf deal in New York, and facilities in California and Texas create a distributed infrastructure footprint that positions Core42 as a provider of what the company calls sovereign cloud and AI infrastructure: compute capacity that can serve both G42’s own AI workloads and those of its customers, including the US-based companies that require data residency within American borders.

The race to secure data centre capacity has drawn startups, sovereign wealth funds, and hyperscalers into direct competition for the same constrained resources: power, land, cooling, and fibre connectivity. In Minneapolis, Legacy Investing’s conversion of an office building into a 21 megawatt facility illustrates how developers are working around those constraints by repurposing existing urban infrastructure rather than competing for greenfield sites in the exurban corridors where most large-scale data centres are built. The approach has limits. Twenty megawatts is a fraction of the capacity that a purpose-built hyperscale facility delivers, and the structural constraints of an existing building make future expansion difficult. But for a tenant like Core42, which needs distributed US presence rather than concentrated scale, the urban conversion model offers something that a greenfield campus in rural Virginia does not: proximity to enterprise customers and the network interconnection density of a major metropolitan area.

The context

The geopolitics of UAE-linked AI infrastructure in the United States remain sensitive. G42 severed its ties with Chinese technology companies in 2024 under pressure from the US government, a prerequisite for receiving access to advanced American AI chips. Microsoft invested 1.5 billion dollars in G42 as part of that realignment, and the company has since positioned itself as a bridge between American AI technology and Gulf capital. OpenAI’s decision to pause its Stargate UK project over energy costs and regulatory concerns has made the UAE’s willingness to build at scale and speed more strategically valuable, and G42’s ability to secure chip imports for the Stargate UAE campus has been treated by the US government as a test case for whether AI infrastructure can be deployed in allied nations without compromising national security.

The financial dynamics of AI infrastructure investment have produced valuations and capital commitments that would have been inconceivable five years ago. Oracle’s stock fell 50 per cent despite a Wall Street buy consensus as concentration risk from its OpenAI dependency spooked investors. Alphabet raised its full-year 2026 capex estimate to between 180 and 190 billion dollars. The International Energy Agency predicts that energy use from data centres will double by the end of 2026. Into this environment, a 20 megawatt lease in a converted Minneapolis office building registers as a footnote. But the tenant signing the lease is the company building the largest AI compute facility outside the United States, and the building it is moving into is one of hundreds of American offices being repurposed to house the infrastructure that is making the offices themselves obsolete. The conversion is not just architectural. It is economic. The same AI systems that emptied the office are now filling it with servers.