This special issue addresses the regional development implications of artificial intelligence as an emerging enabling technology. AI functions both as an independent industry and as infrastructure integrated across existing sectors, with potential to reshape production systems, innovation dynamics, regional governance, and spatial economic organisation. The issue recognises that understanding AI requires examining not only industrial transformation but also how it influences knowledge production and regional governance practices.
The special issue seeks to develop a coherent research agenda by bringing together fragmented discussions across different literatures and scales of analysis. It invites empirically grounded contributions that examine three interconnected dimensions: the spatial organisation of the AI industry itself, the effects of AI on regional development governance and planning, and how AI adoption across incumbent sectors reshapes patterns of regional economic concentration and dispersion.