Smart City Buildout Into 2028 – Feels Like a Real Multi-Year Trade, Who Are You Buying?

From a trading perspective, I’ve been trying to connect macro narratives with what’s actually happening on the ground, and the smart city buildout is one of the cleaner signals I’ve seen in a while.

Let’s start with the fundamentals of the narrative.

Los Angeles alone is coordinating a system that includes around 4,500 connected traffic signals, 165,000 LED streetlights, thousands of digital service endpoints, and citywide data-sharing frameworks. On top of that, they are rolling out 56 additional technology-driven goals leading into the 2028 Olympics.

That creates something markets love, a timeline with a clear deadline.

And markets usually move ahead of timelines, not after them.

Now layer in broader digital adoption. More than 80% of Americans are already connected through smartphones, and over 70% are active online. That means the user layer is already fully built. What’s happening now is the physical layer catching up, infrastructure, energy, mobility, data systems.

That’s exactly what we’re seeing.

From a market structure perspective, these kinds of themes tend to move in phases.

First comes awareness. Then narrative expansion. Then actual capital rotation.

I’d argue smart cities are somewhere between phase one and phase two right now. The deployments are real, the savings are real, travel time down 13%, millions saved annually on energy, but the broader market still hasn’t fully priced in how big this could get.

And the key piece most people overlook is energy.

All of this runs on power. Connected traffic systems, digital services, city apps, lighting networks, data infrastructure, all of it requires reliable, flexible, optimized energy.

Not just generation, but distribution, storage, and real-time management.

That creates a very specific type of opportunity. Not pure tech, not pure utilities, but something in between.

Historically, when infrastructure cycles line up with new technology layers, early-stage names tied to that intersection tend to move before fundamentals fully catch up.

And here we’ve got a multi-year runway into 2028, global attention, government-backed investment, and real deployment already happening.

Feels like the kind of setup where capital slowly starts rotating in, then suddenly everyone notices at once.

So the real question is:

If this “Smart City + Energy + Infrastructure” wave is building into 2028, who are you actually buying to play it?

Curious what tickers people are watching here, especially smaller caps or under-the-radar names that could benefit early.