The Harvard Gazette article “Why Are Communities Pushing Back Against Data Centers?”  is correct about the central problem now driving community opposition: many data center proposals arrive with too little transparency, large projected demands for electricity and sometimes water, and too few protections to ensure that households and small businesses are not forced to subsidize infrastructure built mainly for hyperscale private users.

The emergence of a new class of artificial intelligence—capable not only of understanding software but actively probing, breaking, and reconstructing it—marks a turning point in the history of cybersecurity. Recent developments surrounding a frontier model developed by Anthropic, widely referred to in reporting as Claude Mythos, illustrate a deliberate and strategic approach: deploy the most advanced offensive-capable AI defensively first, hardening the digital infrastructure of modern society before comparable capabilities proliferate.

Artificial intelligence is being introduced to the public under a comforting premise: safety. OpenAI says it approaches safety by assessing current and future risks and balancing capability development with proactive mitigation, while Anthropic’s Responsible Scaling Policy explicitly frames frontier-model deployment around risk governance and tighter controls as capabilities grow. Those are legitimate concerns. There are real dangers involving fraud, cyber abuse, biosecurity, nonconsensual sexual imagery, and other harms.

SpartansFirst and American Technology Venture Lab

Sponsor (Event 1 of 2):

How Your Venture Can Avoid Failing When You Start Winning

5:30-7:30, Thursday April 23, 2026

Presented in cooperation with Tech North Atlanta

Hosted by Tech North Atlanta at 925 North Point Pkwy Suite 130, Alpharetta, GA 30005

SpartansFirst Enables America’s First Citywide Hear2There Accessibility Initiative in Peachtree Corners, GA

Peachtree Corners is the first U.S. city to roll out Hear2There citywide, expanding accessibility for blind and visually impaired residents and visitors. 

Throughout this series, we have examined a sequence of real issues and real examples. We began with the concurrency discussion in Greenville County and the larger policy question it raises for the Upstate. We then looked at California as a warning case, showing how housing scarcity, delay, and fragmented policy can slowly produce very high housing costs and rising homelessness. We examined Austin as an example of a high-growth region that recognized the importance of housing supply and flexibility.

Throughout this series we have examined several examples of how regions respond to rapid population growth. California showed the dangers of housing scarcity and regulatory complexity. Austin illustrated how expanding housing supply can moderate price pressure even during economic expansion. Northern Virginia and Florida demonstrated how corridor planning, infrastructure financing, and concurrency systems can help align development with public capacity.

Yet there is another example that may be even more relevant to the Upstate of South Carolina: Gwinnett County, Georgia .

The first three articles in this series examined the opening policy discussion in Greenville County, the cautionary experience of California’s housing shortage, and the example of Austin’s efforts to expand housing supply while coordinating infrastructure and transportation planning. These cases illustrate both the risks and the opportunities that accompany rapid population growth.

In the previous article we examined California’s housing crisis and the long-term consequences of allowing housing supply to fall behind population and job growth. The lesson from California is not simply that growth is difficult to manage, but that policies which restrict housing supply—intentionally or unintentionally—can create powerful economic pressures that eventually raise housing costs and destabilize communities.

In the previous article we examined California’s housing crisis and the long-term consequences of allowing housing supply to fall behind population and job growth. The lesson from California is not simply that growth is difficult to manage, but that policies which restrict housing supply—intentionally or unintentionally—can create powerful economic pressures that eventually raise housing costs and destabilize communities.