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Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is stirring controversy in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s where he’s building a massive supercomputer to power his company xAI. Community residents and environmental activists say that since the supercomputer was fired up last summer it has become one of the biggest air polluters in the county. But some local officials have championed the billionaire, saying he’s investing in Memphis.
The first public hearing with the health department is scheduled for Friday, where county officials will hear from all sides of the debate. In the run-up to the hearing, secretive fliers claiming xAI has low emissions were sent to residents of historically Black neighborhoods; at the same time, environmental groups have been amassing data about how much pollution the AI company is likely generating.
The dispute came to a head earlier this month when the Southern Environmental Law Center revealed that xAI had quietly moved in at least 35 portable methane gas turbines without air permits to help power its supercomputer. The group says this many generators have the capacity to power an entire city and are enormous emitters of toxic and carcinogenic pollution. The law center made the discovery by taking satellite images of the xAI facility.
Days after the news broke, Memphis mayor Paul Young spoke in a public forum and said he had been in contact with xAI and that the company was not using all of the gas generators, according to WREG News. Young, who has long supported xAI’s operations in Memphis, noted that the company has a pending permit application with the Shelby county health department to run 15 generators.
“There are 35, but there are only 15 that are on,” Young said. “The other ones are stored on the site.”
Now, the Southern Environmental Law Center has taken new photos of xAI that include thermal imaging. These photos show 33 turbines giving off significant amounts of heat, meaning they were all likely in use at the time the photo was taken.
“It is appalling that xAI would operate more than 30 methane gas turbines without any permits or any public oversight,” said Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center. “xAI’s failure to disclose that it’s running dozens of these polluting turbines at its south Memphis data center has left Memphians in the dark about what is being pumped into the air they breathe every day.”
xAI, Young and the Shelby county health department did not return requests for comment.
Musk calls the xAI supercomputer “Colossus”. It’s tasked with providing compute power for xAI’s chatbot Grok. The building that houses Colossus is the size of 13 football fields and Musk has said he plans to double that.
Last month, he purchased another property in Memphis to expand xAI’s infrastructure there. The new property is 1 m sq ft.
Artificial intelligence requires an immense amount of energy to carry out computations and provide quick responses to user queries. In the US, the majority of that electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. Within a couple of miles of xAI are several residential neighborhoods that have long dealt with industrial pollution. This area is historically Black and has higher rates of cancer and asthma and a lower life expectancy than other parts of the city.
Members of this community have been outspoken in their opposition to xAI and have called for more oversight and environmental regulations on the company. Over the past week, thousands of residents here said they received fliers in the mail that downplay the pollution emitted from xAI’s gas turbines.
The fliers come from an anonymous group called “Facts Over Fiction” and have a bullet point list that alleges the turbines are “cleaner tech” and “minor” polluters because they use gas, rather than diesel or coal. The fliers say that the generators are low emissions and are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency and the Shelby county health department. Both of those agencies have said they did not issue permits for xAI’s gas generators.
“Those 15 xAI turbines?” the flier reads. “They’re specially designed to protect the air we all breathe.”
Justin Pearson, a Tennessee state representative who is from this part of Memphis, said in an Instagram post that the fliers are “lying to us about xAI’s methane gas pollution” and “we know methane gas leads to more asthma attacks, leads to more respiratory illness”.
He demanded to know who sent the fliers and encouraged all community members to attend the public hearing on Friday. “We have to combat the lies and misinformation,” he wrote. “Clean air is a human right and the [Shelby county health department] has a duty to protect the air we breathe.”
