How Digital Twins Power AI Cities

How do Digital Twins empower smart cities?

As cities develop and grow, their complexity increases. From traffic congestion and aging infrastructure to healthcare demands, crime prevention and natural disaster readiness, high-stakes decisions are made every day. Balancing energy, manufacturing, and sustainability goals adds another layer to the challenge. Digital twins offer a powerful solution, creating real-time virtual models of city systems to simulate, predict, and optimize urban operations before decisions are made in the real world.

What is a Digital Twin?

A digital twin is a virtual representation of a physical object, process, or system that leverages real-time data to accurately mirror its real-world counterpart’s behavior, performance, and conditions. By using connected sensors to continuously collect data from physical entities, digital twins synchronize virtual models with reality and adhere to physical laws. This enables constant monitoring, simulation, and analysis, providing deeper insights and supporting more informed decision-making. With these capabilities in mind, it is clear why digital twin technology has become an important tool for planning AI Cities – smart cities that are empowered by AI.

For example, in roadside parking management, training AI models requires thousands of license plate images captured under varying lighting, angles, and weather conditions, making it highly labor-intensive. By building a digital twin, cities can generate synthetic data (artificially created data) that replicates the statistical patterns and characteristics of real-world data without direct collection from real-world events or individuals.

Instead of relying solely on data from real users or sensors, synthetic data is generated using algorithms, simulations, or AI models. This approach enables comprehensive coverage of various license plate types and environmental conditions while significantly reducing the time and cost associated with data collection and annotation. As a result, a highly adaptable roadside parking AI system can reduce human error, ensure accurate billing for each vehicle, and support a fair user-pays model — advancing the broader vision of smart city development.

By lowering the cost and risk of physical testing, digital twins can also generate hard-to-obtain data, anticipate potential disruptions, and enhance preparedness for unforeseen events.

Where are Digital Twins being used in cities?

Digital twins are being applied across diverse sectors. This includes simulating city-wide infrastructure systems, energy consumption, utilities, and urban planning scenarios to enhance operational efficiency, sustainability, and long-term resilience. Some of the key areas include:

• Transportation: Predicting traffic patterns, managing fleets, and optimizing logistics and mobility networks to reduce congestion and improve transit efficiency.
• Healthcare: Modeling hospital operations, patient pathways, and disease outbreak simulation to improve resource allocation, capacity planning, and public health response.
• Manufacturing: Optimizing production lines, monitoring equipment, predicting maintenance needs, and reducing downtime through virtual simulations.
• Public Safety & Disaster Response: Simulating emergency scenarios, natural disasters, and evacuation strategies to strengthen preparedness and improve response effectiveness.

Why do digital twins matter for AI cities?

While digital twins are widely used across industries, their true value in an AI City lies in their collective impact. Urban systems, from infrastructure and transportation to healthcare, manufacturing, and public safety, are deeply interconnected. By integrating digital twin technologies across these domains, cities can create a unified, data-driven ecosystem that enables holistic planning, predictive governance, and coordinated decision-making. Together, these industry applications form a comprehensive blueprint for building a smarter, more resilient, and sustainable AI-powered city.

Realizing this vision requires a robust, scalable technology backbone that supports high-performance computing, real-time data integration, secure connectivity, and cross-domain collaboration. This foundational layer ensures that digital twin systems can operate efficiently, share data seamlessly, and deliver advanced simulation and AI-driven insights across the entire urban ecosystem.

What digital twin technology does ASUS have for smart cities?

Previously, digital twin city models relied on satellite imagery, map surveys, and BIM (Building Information Modeling). Today, AI-driven digital twin technology, powered by advanced simulation engines and large-scale 3D scene databases, enables faster and more accurate city modeling.

Platforms such as AI True Cloud, developed by Taiwan AI Cloud, leverage high-speed computing and cloud infrastructure to support digital twin development.

• AI True Cloud: A 3D modeling and digital twin collaboration platform built for cities and industries. It supports urban planning, public infrastructure management, operations optimization, and cross-agency coordination, while helping reduce computing and implementation costs.
• AI Factory concept: ASUS, together with Taiwan AI Cloud, is actively working on the AI Factory concept in healthcare, integrating robotics, AI, and digital twin technology, to introduce a new operational model. Hospitals have long faced workforce shortages and efficiency bottlenecks. By combining AI-powered robotics for patient transport, medication delivery, supply distribution, and disinfection with virtual hospital simulations, institutions can optimize workflows, predict equipment maintenance needs, and improve overall efficiency.
• Platform-Level Integration: Additional initiatives include the Taiwan Health and Bio DataBank’s Digital Twin Platform, which supports public health disaster prevention, low-carbon modeling, and FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources)-compliant sovereign healthcare data services, enabling secure, interoperable public health digital twin applications.
• AI Digital Twin Lab: ASUS and NVIDIA have partnered with NTUST to establish Taiwan’s first AI Digital Twin Lab, bringing advanced AI and high‑performance computing to academia. Equipped with ASUS AI laptops powered by NVIDIA® GeForce RTX™ 4070 GPUs, the lab enables large‑scale deep learning, digital modeling, and predictive analytics. Students gain hands‑on experience through industry collaboration, while applications span smart manufacturing, autonomous driving, construction, and smart city governance. This initiative strengthens Taiwan’s AI ecosystem and accelerates innovation across diverse industries.

Cultivating AI Talent in Taiwan

Through initiatives like Taiwan AI Cloud’s AIHPC accelerator, a city transformation and innovation consortium is being built in Taiwan to connect startup applications with national-level computing resources and incubate smart city use cases. Together, these efforts support next-gen applications, nurture young talent, and strengthen Taiwan’s AI ecosystem.

By combining hardware innovation, AI technologies, and industry-academia partnerships, ASUS is helping drive future innovation and ensure Taiwan remains at the forefront of global AI development. Working hand in hand with digital twin initiatives, these programs further enable cities to simulate, optimize, and scale solutions, reinforcing Taiwan’s leadership in sustainable, intelligent urban transformation.

Click here for the AI City 2026 Media Kit

To learn more about AI Cities, please visit: AI City: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Smart Cities