Coming of a New Sun

Six weeks after the US and China hammered out the latest round of bilateral compute agreements in a midnight deal, reporter Jenny Gesteson visits a south Texas 'dark factory' to see how the machines there - and the minds that operate them - are learning to run themselves. After racing south down I-37 from San Antonio and clearing the border control checkpoints that now face in both directions, miles of salt flats and thornscrub at our backs, we could have been forgiven for assuming the final turn-off was nothing but another abandoned ranch. The road's overgrown fringe of invasive guineagrass and the piercing sound of undisturbed cicadas do nothing to indicate what lies at the end of it. Most traffic does not come this way. We are an exception, however, following a specially-designed and "exceedingly private" mapping application sent by our host, and after two miles of bumping down gravel in an electric 4x4 our journey is suddenly terminated by the appearance against the dim predawn horizon of a complex aglow with a corona of lights. The "dark factory" is anything but dark. Things are busy at Complex 18A. Situated within the South Texas Special Economic Zone, or SEZ, the complex is governed by a byzantine and ever-shifting thicket of domestic regulations and treaty obligations metonymically referred to as the US-China Protocol on Averting Uncontrolled Superintelligence Experiments, or USCHINAPAUSE. We reach the reinforced plate of the facility's main gate, the only gap for mi…