Hi @AndrewS welcome to the community and good to hear you are interested in becoming a node provider. You can find most of the information on becoming a node provider on the IC wiki pages, in particular the Roadmap gives a high level overview of the process. Most community discussion takes place in this forum thread and for technical questions there is a separate Element channel that you can join.
Hopefully this gives this the right information.
Note that for the time being, the IC network has reached so called “target topology” which means with the current node machines the decentralization targets. So no new node machines will be added for the time being, but this might change in the future depending on the growth of the IC network.