Part of the reason the US isn’t as densely populated as India and China is the fact that it’s a young nation compared to most of the major nations.

China has about the same land mass as the US, as does India, but they’ve been around for thousands of years and have created so many megacities around the transition from their industrial and agrarian base to the new tech-driven, digital economy.

As you can see above, the US is moving in the same direction at a rapid clip.

The graph below gives you a sense of how many nations have megacities that are continuing to expand.

Many of these cities have been around for millennia and have the challenge of upgrading their old infrastructure with new modern infrastructure to keep up with the population and the ability to do business at that scale. This is like building an airplane while you’re flying it, but it’s happening as we speak in both megacities and smaller cities around the world.

This is going to provide significant opportunities for New Economy companies that are doing the “smart city” work that’s illustrated below.

It’s also about Old Economy companies that are going to be the brawn for those brains.

For example, smart roads will be about new smart concrete to traffic management to actually building those new roads and wiring those stoplights.

Many of these new opportunities are going to come from New Economy companies, like Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOG), NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA), Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN), Honeywell (NYSE:HON), and Itron (NASDAQ:ITRI).

There will also be a number of Old Economy companies that will be essential to get this all done. Caterpillar (NYSE:CAT), Deere & Co (NYSE:DE), Textron (NYSE:TXT), Xylem (NYSE:XYL), Waste Management (NYSE:WM), and others will also be big winners.