DAVID FRIEDMAN: Why Abilene, TX is an AI Boomtown. “Abilene, Texas — population 125,000, more churches than startups, home to a retired Air Force base and a few cattle auctions — is quietly becoming a node in the global AI substrate. And not because it has top-tier researchers or a founder scene. It doesn’t. That’s the point. Abilene isn’t building apps. It’s building the physical substrate of cognition. It has something more valuable than talent or capital: land, power, fiber, and silence. . . . The fantasy of AI still gets marketed as weightless: all in the cloud, ethereal, placeless. But that fantasy is collapsing under the weight of physical constraint. . . . Here’s the real thesis: The map of AI is being redrawn, not by founders, but by land use lawyers, grid operators, and infrastructure billionaires.”