---
title: "Cloud Megaregionalization: Valley of the Sun"
description: "Sara Drake, Noya Kohavi, Sarah Olimpia Scott, and Julian Siravo argue that semiconductor production is reorganizing the Arizona–Sonora border region around geopolitical security."
type: "reading-notes"
authors:
  - "Sara Drake"
  - "Noya Kohavi"
  - "Sarah Olimpia Scott"
  - "Julian Siravo"
published: "2023"
original_url: "https://cloudmegaregions.site/Cloud_Megaregionalization.pdf"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/work/studio/cloud-megaregionalization"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/work/studio/cloud-megaregionalization"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Cloud Megaregionalization: Valley of the Sun

> Independent, unofficial reading notes from Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki). Written with AI from the published text, with citations; not by the work's author and not affiliated with Antikythera (https://antikythera.org). Read the original at the link below.

- **Authors:** Sara Drake, Noya Kohavi, Sarah Olimpia Scott, Julian Siravo
- **Published:** 2023
- **Kind:** Studio projects · Studio paper
- **Venue:** Planetary Computation Studio
- **Original:** https://cloudmegaregions.site/Cloud_Megaregionalization.pdf
- **Length:** 2.8k words
- **This page:** https://antikythera.wiki/work/studio/cloud-megaregionalization
- **Notes generated:** 2026-09-06

## Summary

[Sara Drake](https://antikythera.wiki/people/sara-drake), [Noya Kohavi](https://antikythera.wiki/people/noya-kohavi), [Sarah Olimpia Scott](https://antikythera.wiki/people/sarah-olimpia-scott), and [Julian Siravo](https://antikythera.wiki/people/julian-siravo) argue that semiconductor production is reorganizing the Arizona–Sonora border region around geopolitical security. Their 2023 paper connects a century of military procurement, agricultural transformation, and managed labor migration to the emerging concentration of chip factories, mines, research facilities, and data centers. National self-sufficiency remains dependent on international cooperation and differences between neighboring jurisdictions. The resulting cloud megaregion faces a contradiction: strategic investment attracts factories and residents to a desert whose water supplies, clean energy capacity, and rising temperatures may undermine the conditions of production and habitation.

## The argument

The authors begin with a change in the organizing logic of planetary computation. Globalization distributed production according to cheap labor, free trade, and profit. Geopolitical strategy now increasingly redirects those networks. They call the emerging arrangement hemisphericalization: the formation of allied territories and material flows that build partly distinct computational systems. This is larger than a return of manufacturing to individual countries. Their initial contrast between North America and East Asia develops into an account of alliances that reach across oceans.

The Arizona–Sonora region makes this process geographically concrete. A cloud requires mines, energy, factories, laboratories, logistics, and workers. Where these components concentrate depends on decisions about which dependencies governments will tolerate. The authors approach TSMC's Arizona investment through an earlier transformation of the same territory. In their historical account, wartime disruption of Egyptian cotton supplies led Goodyear to substitute irrigated Arizona farmland for the Nile Delta. The company needed Mexican labor, while security measures were restricting migration. Industrial development therefore involved both reshaping the desert and negotiating exceptions to the border regime.

Semiconductor strategy repeats this coupling of distant conflict and local transformation. The paper's example of restrictions on Russian access to European weather data connects computing capacity to the ability to foresee events and conduct military operations. Chips matter because they support sensing, modeling, communications, and inference. Their manufacture becomes a security concern even where moving production makes weak commercial sense. The authors describe subsidies and restrictions on investment in countries of concern as mechanisms for changing the geography of production.

Yet reshoring does not eliminate cross-border dependence. The authors stress that the US CHIPS Act operates through coordination with allies. At regional scale, Arizona's foreign trade zones and Mexico's assembly plants create complementary economic arrangements. Borders filter different flows differently: they restrict the movement of workers while generating opportunities to move materials and manufacturing activities. The megaregion depends on the differences between jurisdictions as much as on connections across them.

The closing constraint is ecological. Industrial subsidies and trade rules can attract investment without producing enough water or reducing dangerous heat. The paper describes clean energy plans, construction restrictions, and population growth as interacting pressures. Its conclusion leaves the project conditional on government support and regional adaptation. It does not offer a tested sustainability model or a plan demonstrating that growth can remain within environmental limits.

## Section by section

### Introduction

Silicon Valley and Shenzhen establish precedents for concentrations of computation's physical infrastructure. The authors distinguish the market-led formation of such regions from the strategic realignment they identify in 2023. The Valley of the Sun becomes a case through which to observe how global rivalry assembles a regional production system.

### Global Conflict and the Terraforming of Arizona

The historical narrative begins with the 1917 cotton shortage and Goodyear's purchase of 16,000 acres southwest of Phoenix. Clearing vegetation and extending irrigation turned the desert into agricultural land. The authors also describe the 1918 conflict at Nogales and subsequent border fences as physical transformations of territory. Corporate lobbying for temporary Mexican workers links the making of the Sun Corridor to managed labor mobility. This history establishes the comparison with semiconductor investment: geopolitical emergencies reorganize resources and labor far from the conflict itself.

### Semiconductors and Geopolitical Strategy

The paper treats weather forecasting as a military resource, citing the restriction of Russian access to European meteorological data after the invasion of Ukraine. It then connects specialized chips to parallel processing, signals intelligence, communications, radar, and lethal automation. The argument concerns control of predictive capacity. Its market-share figures should be read cautiously: a claim about three Taiwanese firms controlling 90 percent of gallium-arsenide chips is followed in the next section by a similarly worded claim about advanced semiconductor manufacturing generally. The text does not explain this change of category.

### New Geographies of the Cloud

TSMC's earlier difficulties in Camas, Washington, make the Arizona project a case of political imperatives overriding commercial reservations. The authors describe prospective US support, profit-sharing conditions, and limits on expansion in designated foreign countries. They widen the frame to industrial policies in China, South Korea, Japan, India, and Europe, alongside efforts to secure minerals. Their examples include Yongin, Magdeburg, and a region joining Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia. These are presented as 2023 developments and expectations, not as a later assessment of which investments succeeded. Their common mechanism is the coordination of different labor costs, research capabilities, resources, and security interests.

### The Alchemy of Thresholds

Foreign Trade Zone 75 provides the clearest example of a border operating through selective exceptions. The authors describe exemptions for raw materials, delayed duties, and tariffs that can favor finished products over components. Mexican maquiladoras perform a complementary function by importing inputs, assembling goods, and exporting them. The 1965 Border Industrialization Program and the 2019 northern border tax zone establish successive layers of policy around the international boundary. Nearshoring depends on this layered geography rather than the disappearance of borders.

### Can the Region Sustain Chip Manufacturing?

The authors connect factory electricity demand to Arizona's energy transition and proposed solar development in Sonora. They then turn to groundwater restrictions, employment-driven population growth, and projected extreme heat. Data centers sharpen the contradiction because reliability attracts them while cooling adds another environmental demand. The source repeats much of its energy-policy discussion and contains apparent errors, including a projected increase of “1.5 people.” Those passages do not support a precise demographic or resource forecast. The section's defensible interpretive point is that the region's industrial attractiveness and long-term habitability cannot be treated as separate planning questions.

### Conclusion

The authors return to the collision between demand for semiconductors and environmental limits. They identify two conditions for the Southwest's transformation: continued backing from an interventionist US government and regional capacity to counter worsening conditions for human life. Neither is established as secure.

## Key concepts

- **Cloud megaregion** — A territorial concentration of extraction, manufacturing, research, logistics, and computing facilities organized around the material requirements of the cloud.
- **[Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/hemispherical-stacks)** — Partly separate but entangled computational systems formed through geopolitical alliances. Here their formation redirects industrial investment across regions and countries.
- **[Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/terms/planetary-computation)** — The geographically distributed material and informational infrastructure whose operation depends on chips, energy, resources, labor, and institutions.
- **Friend-shoring** — Reorganizing supply chains through allied countries. The paper treats it as evidence that national-security policy still requires international production networks.
- **Thresholds** — Differences in legal, economic, and labor conditions that make border regions productive. Trade zones and assembly regimes selectively alter the terms of crossing.

## Connections

- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks) develops the same connection between computational infrastructure and geopolitical division. Its introduction includes energy, minerals, logistics, platforms, and users within sovereign computational systems. This earlier studio paper supplies a regional industrial case for that broader thesis. Its account of a US-aligned production network also complicates any reading of hemispheres as simple geographical halves.
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc) explicitly names Cloud Megaregionalization as research into regions organized around producing something for the cloud, from mining to chip design. Bratton's account agrees with the paper's shift from treating computation as an industry within a region to treating it as a force organizing the region itself.


## Related works

- [Hemispherical Stacks](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/hemstacks)
- [Speculative Philosophy of Planetary Computation](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/spoc)