"We are a real city environment," Curiosity Lab Executive Director Emily Heintz told Cities Today this summer. Companies working with her team, she explained, aren't testing whether something works in a lab. They're finding out how it holds up against live traffic, real intersections, sidewalks, driveways, tree coverage, pedestrians and the ordinary businesses that make up Peachtree Corners' Town Center.
That distinction matters more than it sounds like it should. Most cities that brand themselves as smart-city testbeds still keep the actual testing behind a fence, on a closed track built for the purpose. Peachtree Corners does the opposite on purpose, and this year the city put real money behind that choice.
The Route Got Longer, and So Did the Money Behind It
Curiosity Lab's autonomous vehicle route started as a three-mile stretch of 5G-connected roadway wired with sensors and smart infrastructure. As of this summer, following a year-long expansion, that route runs nearly four miles through the city's working streets, according to Cities Today's July 2026 reporting on the program.
The expansion didn't just add pavement. It came paired with a new funded initiative called the Autonomous Mobility Program, which pays companies to deploy on those public roads rather than in a sealed proving ground. The structure is straightforward:
- Grants range from $25,000 to $250,000 per selected company
- Funding is administered through Curiosity Lab, using the city's own test route
- Eligible technologies include autonomous passenger shuttles, delivery vehicles, logistics platforms and robotic mobility systems ready for real-world deployment or early-stage scaling
Heintz framed the goal plainly: many autonomous mobility companies have already exhausted what a controlled lab or closed proving ground can tell them, and Peachtree Corners is positioning itself as the next step, a place where a company can validate a product among actual drivers and actual pedestrians before it goes anywhere else.
What's Already Running on Those Streets
This isn't theoretical. Seyond's Ghost Intersection Technology has been operating at the SR141 intersection, built specifically to protect vulnerable road users, the industry term for pedestrians and cyclists sharing space with vehicles. The deployment earned Peachtree Corners and Seyond a Smart 20 Award from Smart Cities Connect and an IDC Smart Cities Award for urban planning, recognition that the intersection isn't a demo but a functioning safety system running on a road people use to get to Town Center every day.
Clevon's ARC, an autonomous delivery robot built around package theft prevention, is also being developed at the Lab. The company's stated goal is public use once the technology clears further testing, meaning the version running through Curiosity Lab's ecosystem right now is a working step toward robots that could eventually handle porch deliveries in the same neighborhoods where residents already get packages stolen off their front steps.
The Building Caught Up to the Road
For years the story at Curiosity Lab was mostly about the pavement and the sensors. That changed this month with the soft opening of the Lab's expanded Innovation Center, roughly 25,000 square feet of offices, workshops, classrooms, meeting rooms and event space built directly beside the autonomous testing route.
Mayor Mike Mason compared the opening to a restaurant's friends-and-family night, guests wandering through, sampling everything, poking into every corner, with one caveat he offered only half-joking: at a technology center, you probably shouldn't push every button. The comparison was informal, but the substance behind it wasn't. Mason was direct about why the city keeps investing in this campus at all: "It's about economic development. More companies here bring more talent here, bring more investment here." City Manager Brian Johnson put it in terms of currency, describing community activity itself as the thing Peachtree Corners is trying to accumulate.
The new space also formalized something that had been building quietly since April 2025, when Georgia Tech established its first Atrium site inside Curiosity Lab, a research and collaboration space meant to give students direct access to the same testing environment companies use. That partnership means the people working through problems on this route aren't only corporate engineers passing through for a pilot. Some of them are Georgia Tech students doing coursework a few steps from the sidewalk where the technology gets tested.
None of this happened overnight. T-Mobile's original 2019 partnership with the city built the 5G backbone the whole system still runs on, and 2026 marks Curiosity Lab's seventh year operating on that foundation. The expanded Innovation Center and the new funding program are the latest layer on infrastructure that's been compounding for most of a decade, not a sudden pivot.
The Same Blocks Host the Festival
None of this technology sits in isolation from the rest of Town Center. The weekend of September 19 and 20, Peachtree Corners held its 15th annual Peachtree Corners Festival on the Town Green, the same 21-acre green space behind the shops and restaurants at Town Center, just blocks from Technology Parkway. The festival ran free admission and free parking, with headline act Guardians of the Jukebox playing to a crowd that came for lawn chairs, dinner from a Town Center restaurant and a Saturday night outdoors, not for anything related to autonomous vehicles.
That Town Green is also home to a splash pad, playgrounds, a small dog park, walking paths, café tables and covered pavilions, the ordinary fixtures of a suburban gathering space. The Farmers Market runs there too, along with Flicks on the Green and Light Up the Corners later in the year. None of that changed when the Innovation Center opened three weeks ago or when the Autonomous Mobility Program launched over the summer. The festival didn't get smaller to make room for the tech campus, and the tech campus didn't need the festival to move to expand.
That's the actual shift worth understanding. Peachtree Corners isn't choosing between being a walkable town center and being a place where companies pay to test emerging technology on public roads. It's running both at once, on overlapping ground, without treating either as the exception. A city that wanted to keep its testbed separate from its community life had every option to build a closed track somewhere on the edge of town. Peachtree Corners built the funding program to work through its own public roads instead, and opened a new building for it right next to where the route already runs.
Curiosity Lab describes its approach as a living laboratory, a phrase that shows up across the city's own materials and the trade press covering it. What that phrase means in practice, as of this fall, is a nearly four-mile route carrying real traffic, a newly funded pipeline of companies willing to pay to test there, a building that just opened to house them, and a festival that ran on the exact same Town Green three weeks after all of it.
If the pace of change at Curiosity Lab and Town Center has you curious about how Peachtree Corners is holding up as a place to live day to day, The Suits Team keeps a close eye on how this kind of growth shapes the neighborhoods around it. Reach out anytime you want a local read on what's actually happening here.
