HyperWerx™: A First-Of-Its-Kind Facility for Driving AI Innovation for National Defense

The best innovation doesn’t live in the lab—it’s tested, improved, and matured in the real world. This is why we’ve dedicated a new space to continuously experimenting and advancing solutions to the world’s most important problems. For SparkCognition Government Systems (SGS), its parent company SparkCognition, and a host of other partners, that dedicated innovation space is spread over 50 acres of open land in the greater Austin, Texas area.

On behalf of SparkCognition, we’re thrilled to announce the opening of the new HyperWerx facility, the world’s first aerial-terrestrial autonomy integration facility. The HyperWerx campus will showcase the potential of artificial intelligence (AI) innovation, and will enable SGS and its partners to design, build, test, deploy, and showcase intelligent solutions that enhance the physical systems that run society and the national security and defense mission of the US and its allies. You can read the full press release here.

What is the Purpose of the HyperWerx Facility?

As the world’s first full-spectrum AI company devoted entirely to government and national defense, SGS needed a facility in which it could explore new systems and deliver cutting-edge solutions that ensure warfighter readiness across a diverse set of missions. While we have an Applied Research department within the organization to build and test AI embedded into physical systems, the HyperWerx facility provides ample space to test AI solutions for a variety of systems that are critical to enhancing mission readiness.

SparkCognition Founder and CEO — and SGS Board Member — Amir Husain had this to say about how and why the HyperWerx facility came to be:

“When you work with technology as nebulous as software, it can be challenging to visualize exactly how AI and physical systems will work together. Beyond that, it is simply not possible to develop new physical applications without the experimentation, testing and safety validation process. With that in mind, we conceived HyperWerx – a place where we can truly explore the interplay between AI software and the physical systems, which I believe will be a core driver in shaping the future of society.”

While this is just the initial phase of the entire HyperWerx campus, there are already several different systems being built and tested at the facility, ranging from experimental to production systems that will be used to support both commercial and defense customers.

“Real innovation comes from having a concept and getting out and testing it,” said Logan Jones, General Manager and President of SGS. “Ultimately, this brings the idea of AI’s transformational impact off of paper and into the real world, hand-in-hand with our customers and partners.”

What Is SGS Doing At the HyperWerx Facility?

The need for government and defense to adopt AI technology has never been more critical than it is today. In particular, the Department of Defense (DoD) has a wide variety of unique and challenging use cases that require the ability to quickly test and innovate new technologies to meet mission requirements. With the HyperWerx facility up and running, SGS and its partners can help organizations make faster use of innovative technologies as emerging threats to our warfighters surface.

To start, the HyperWerx facility will allow SGS to innovate and iterate alongside our customers in a live environment, which ensures we can tailor our solutions to customer needs to meet their specific mission requirements. Perhaps more importantly, the HyperWerx facility will enable us to bring forward the most innovative AI solutions alongside the DoD and at a pace that reflects the nature of threats. 

What Are Some Examples of Systems You’re Testing? 

Spanning a wide range of civil and defense uses, one challenge we’re addressing is protecting unpiloted aircraft from advanced cyber attacks—spoofing, viruses, malware, and other threats—when conducting missions both at home and abroad. At the HyperWerx facility, we aim to solve this challenge by deploying an AI-powered cybersecurity solution.

Thus, we’ve been testing SparkCognition’s DeepArmor® cybersecurity product to provide more advanced airspace security than traditional anti-malware that are reliant on signatures of known threats. Instead of using known signatures, heuristics, or rules-based approaches, the DeepArmor product uses patented machine learning technology and a layered protection strategy to protect a drone’s endpoints.

Another challenge we’re addressing at the HyperWerx facility is enhancing warfighter visibility and situation awareness when on critical missions in austere and hostile environments. To solve this challenge, we’ll be experimenting with our own autonomous unattended ground sensors we call Perceptive Dust. These low cost, attritable sensors create a mesh network and can be deployed on drones to deliver an information advantage for warfighters and keep them safe. By leveraging machine learning to fuse and analyze the ingested data, the technology creates a more complete ISR picture that enables warfighters to understand the type of environmental information that improves situation awareness and insight.

This is an exciting time for SGS as we continue to ramp up innovation efforts and drive impact for government and defense customers at scale. While the HyperWerx facility is not open to the public, we look forward to sharing with you what we’ll be working on in the coming months and years to support our mission of enhancing warfighter readiness with the latest AI innovations.

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