The article mentions Ascension Island, a small island in the south atlantic. There's a really great spy novel that takes places there, Ascension by Oliver Harris.

I just finished that recently, I think "A Shadow Intelligence" from the same author is even better so can recommend that too.

One of the cofounders is formerly from poolside (poolside.ai), where they produce open-weight coding models. One of their recent models, Laguna, got quite a bit of attention here on HN.