Late at night at the Silver Legacy in Reno, Nevada, in an elevator from the casino to the hotel rooms above, a man told me that he was having a miserable time, though he used stronger language. He’d just lost $20,000 at the tables. The casino was cursed, the city was cursed, the state was cursed. He was heading to wake up his girlfriend and drive them home to California.

To do that, he’d head west through the forest of the Sierra Nevada mountains, escaping the Great Basin into the Central Valley and towards the blue ocean beyond. I would head in the other direction, deep into the desert heart of the jagged brown bowl of the American west.

Just east of the neon of Reno is an area that advertises itself as the largest industrial park in the world. Its tenants include major factories, distribution facilities and data centres. They are the back-office infrastructure of modern commerce and the power-hungry engine rooms of modern computing and AI.