"Give them a little money, pollute, and kill" — Inside xAI's charm offensive in Memphis
Elon Musk has recently launched a local charm offensive in the Memphis, Tennessee, neighborhoods where his artificial intelligence startup has become a leading polluter through its illicit use of smog-creating gas turbines.
On Friday, Musk's xAI, which operates a massive, energy-guzzling supercomputer in southwest Memphis, said that it plans to make several contributions to improve the local school district without citing a monetary value. The contributions will purportedly include HVAC upgrades and ventilation inspections at four schools in southwest Memphis. Musk, meanwhile, said on Saturday that his nonprofit foundation had donated $350,000 — or 0.00009 % of his net worth — to the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis, which recently closed nine of its high school programs due to a lack of funding.
"Kids are the future of humanity," Musk said in a statement touting the donation to the Commercial Appeal, a Memphis newspaper. The donation from Musk will enable the club to reopen programs at two high schools, both of which are located several miles from the source of xAI's pollution.
But Representative Justin Pearson (D), a member of the Tennessee House whose district includes the neighborhoods most harmed by xAI's pollution, described the gifts as a cheap PR stunt that Musk is using to distract and placate.
"There's no amount of money that xAI can give that's going to undo the harm that they have caused our community with the illegal polluting they have been doing for over a year," Pearson told Musk Watch, referring to the methane gas turbines that xAI has used to power Colossus, its supercomputer in Memphis. "They have contributed to higher levels of cancer-causing chemicals and pollution in this area in ways that are detrimental to the life, health, and well-being of people here. Our lungs and our lives are not for sale."
XAI did not respond to a request for comment.
Musk began building the Colossus facility last year and made it fully operational within a matter of months, all without input from the local community. For the site's location, xAI chose a former Electrolux factory in Boxtown, a southwest Memphis neighborhood almost entirely populated by Black residents. Boxtown, which abuts numerous large manufacturing and energy facilities, had among the worst air quality in the nation even before the arrival of xAI. A 2013 study from the Atmospheric Environment journal found that southwest Memphis had a cancer rate more than four times higher than the national average.
With xAI operating at least 15 methane gas turbines to help power Colossus' 230,000 graphics processing units, the dangerous levels of smog and formaldehyde in the area have only increased. Smog, or ground-level ozone, is created when nitrogen oxides emitted by gas turbines mix with volatile organic compounds and react with sunlight. These emissions have been linked to asthma, respiratory diseases, cardiovascular issues, and some forms of cancer.
That xAI is publicizing its repairs to the ventilation systems of Memphis schools while simultaneously polluting the air surrounding those schools is "sick" and "inhumane," said LaTricea Adams, a Memphis native and the president of Young, Gifted & Green, an environmental justice organization. "We have got to come up with a way to generate revenue to take care of our children and our families that doesn't put us in a predicament where we have a really nasty decision to make," said Adams, whose family has lived for generations in the part of Memphis where xAI now operates. "But my God, we don't want to take blood money."
On Tuesday night, the school board for Memphis and Shelby County approved xAI's "in-kind donations." MSCS interim superintendent Roderick Richmond and the Boys and Girls Club of Greater Memphis did not respond to requests for comment.
Pearson and Adams were both skeptical of another one of xAI's philanthropic claims — that its employees, along with local contractors, had cleaned up 100 tons of trash and debris in the neighborhoods around its supercomputer site. "They're making insinuations like, 'Oh, this Black community was just filthy, and we upstanding rich white people needed to come in and save the day,'" said Adams, adding, "How dare you think that you need to come and clean my community up.
Last week, xAI announced that it had "begun deploying the initial phase of computing infrastructure" for a second supercomputer facility. The so-called Colossus 2 facility would require more than double the energy currently consumed by Colossus 1 and is located in Whitehaven, another predominantly Black neighborhood about five miles east of Boxtown. To rapidly build out Colossus 2, Brent Mayo, xAI's Memphis lead, has said the company will be "copying and pasting" what it did at the Colossus 1 site.
Timing the rollout of Colossus 2, which Musk said will house 550,000 GPUs, with xAI's local philanthropy push is not a coincidence, Pearson asserted.
"They're just playing the same playbook that corporations have played for over a century," the lawmaker said. "Give them a little money, pollute, and kill them. We're a sacrifice zone for them. We are an extractive colony for them, but the extraction is coming at the loss of our lives, our lungs, and our health."
On July 2, xAI received a permit from the Shelby County Health Department to operate 15 gas turbines at its facility in Boxtown. But before that permit, xAI had spent months operating dozens of unpermitted turbines and misleading the public about the number of turbines it was using. On July 17, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) filed an appeal on behalf of the NAACP and Young, Gifted & Green challenging the permit that the Shelby County Health Department provided to xAI.
The Shelby County Health Department and Air Pollution Control Board did not respond to requests for comment.
Under the relevant municipal bylaws, the SELC's appeal automatically stays the xAI permit, meaning the company no longer has permission to operate its 15 turbines, according to Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney at the SELC. "Legally speaking, they currently don't have an active permit that governs the 15 turbines that they've applied for," said Anderson. However, satellite data gathered by the SELC found that xAI continued to operate gas turbines after the July 17 appeal.
XAI has previously attempted to temper concerns about its pollution output by claiming that it would begin installing "state-of-the-art emissions control technology" on its turbines. But Anderson noted that the selective catalytic reduction (SCR) control technology promoted by xAI is fairly common, and while it reduces the creation of smog, it does not prevent it.
"It is effective technology, but part of the problem with what's happened for the last year is that [xAI hasn't] been using it," he said. "Now, what can be misleading is that they're talking about how special it is. It's not like they're going out of their way to install a novel, extra-special technology. Most turbines that are installed these days will use that same SCR control technology." The latest satellite data gathered by the SELC found that xAI had begun installing the technology on a handful of turbines.
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Memphis gotta rise up as one - black, white, rich, poor - just one big city and say "No!" to Musk. The better neighborhoods are breathing a sigh of relief that the polluted air from Musk's turbines don't dare waft into their backyards. Oh, wait...