West Texas dust, iron-tinged and orange-red, rides the wind and sticks like a film to everything you touch. It clings to skin and the inside of your mouth, a fine grit that turns every breath into a reminder of where you are. This is the landscape where OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is orchestrating something called Stargate — a fast-expanding constellation of data centers, backed by partners including Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank. Some 6,000 workers’ vehicles pour into the site each morning. Tires raise a constant veil of grit over a construction footprint the size of a small city — more people working this single campus than OpenAI employs across its entire payroll. Rain comes in flashes. One minute the roads are powder; the next they’re mud — thick, adhesive, the kind that tugs at boots and gums up machinery. Then the storm moves on, the sun returns, and the surface hardens again, cracked and chalky, as if the place is trying to erase the evidence that water ever touched it.

Full report : The year AI tech giants, and billions in debt, began remaking the American landscape.