PROPOSED REVISION JUNE 27, 2026
SPARTANBURG COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA
ORDINANCE NO. _-20
AN ORDINANCE ESTABLISHING A COMPREHENSIVE REGULATORY FRAMEWORK FOR MAJOR DATA CENTER FACILITIES WITHIN SPARTANBURG COUNTY, SOUTH CAROLINA; PROVIDING FOR DEVELOPMENT STANDARDS, TRANSPARENCY, AND ACCOUNTABILITY; AND PROVIDING FOR RELATED MATTERS
DRAFT
COMPREHENSIVE DATA CENTER ORDINANCE
The article that sparked this discussion, “The Tiny AI Chip Running at 80 MHz”, was distributed through 1440 Media and can be found at:
Why can you barely remember the details of a report you read last week, yet recall exactly where you were when you heard devastating news years ago?
The answer may lie in one of the most important discoveries in modern neuroscience: your brain does not treat all information equally. Information attached to emotion is often processed, stored, and recalled differently than information presented in a neutral, unemotional way.
For years, advanced AI coding assistants required cloud infrastructure, expensive API subscriptions, or access to large data center resources. That is changing rapidly. One of the most interesting examples is the emergence of local AI models such as Gemma 4 12B and community derivatives like Gemma 4 12B Coder-Fable-5, which bring surprisingly capable reasoning and software development assistance directly onto a developer’s workstation.
In 2026, researchers at Stanford University published a paper titled Scaling Self-Play with Self-Guidance by Luke Bailey, Kaiyue Wen, Kefan Dong, Tatsunori Hashimoto, and Tengyu Ma.
The paper addresses one of the biggest challenges facing artificial intelligence today: what happens when an AI system has already learned most of the high-quality human-generated data available?
Two counties in Pennsylvania have the right idea about managing transparency and accountability for large scale data centers. I would only recommend a few enhancements for Upstate South Carolina and Spartanburg County.
The original county source is the April 2026 Data Center Ordinance Guide, Version 1.0, prepared jointly by the Chester County Planning Commission and Montgomery County Planning Commission. The guide is available from Chester County’s official data center page and Montgomery County’s official guide page, with the PDF also mirrored through PA DEP.
Most scientists spend a lifetime pursuing a single breakthrough.
Demis Hassabis used one breakthrough to prove he was ready for the next one.
After helping create AlphaFold—a system that predicted the three-dimensional structures of more than 200 million proteins and transformed biological research—Hassabis shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. But protein folding was never his ultimate destination.
His long-term objective has remained remarkably consistent for more than three decades: understand intelligence well enough to build it.
The National Science Foundation has launched one of its most important experimental research-funding models in years: NSF X-Labs, a $1.5 billion, decade-long initiative intended to create independent, full-time research organizations focused on breakthrough platform technologies that are too large, too risky, too interdisciplinary, and too long-cycle for conventional academic grants, SBIR awards, or venture capital.
The claim that “Elon Musk’s new Terafab AI chip shocked Nvidia” is more marketing heat than confirmed technical fact. Tesla has not publicly released a new data-center GPU that beats Nvidia Blackwell or Vera Rubin. What has emerged is more important strategically: Musk’s companies are trying to escape dependence on Nvidia by building a vertically integrated AI compute stack that includes custom chips, vehicles, robots, satellites, data centers, and potentially large-scale semiconductor manufacturing in Texas.