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Information on urban built-up infrastructure is essential to understand the role of cities in shaping environmental, economic, and social outcomes. The lack of data on built-up heights over large areas has limited our ability to characterize urban infrastructure and its spatial variations across the world. Here, we developed a global atlas of urban built-up heights circa 2015 at 500-m resolution from the Sentinel-1 Ground Range Detected satellite data. Results show extreme gaps in per capita urban built-up infrastructure in the Global South compared with the global average, and even larger gaps compared with the average levels in the Global North. Per capita urban built-up infrastructures in some countries in the Global North are more than 30 times higher than those in the Global South. The results also show that the built-up infrastructure in 45 countries in the Global North combined, with ∼16% of the global population …