What does digitalization actually bring to urban governance? Liu Gang, chair professor of industrial ecology at Peking University, argues that digital services have generated massive amounts of information beyond the reach of traditional data collection methods. At the same time, digitalization itself is reshaping the scale and nature of the problems we face – the impacts of data centers, the internet and digital infrastructure have become new issues that must be studied. Opportunity and challenge coexist in the digitalization of urban governance.