‘How come I can’t breathe?’: Musk’s data canter draws a backlash in Memphis
The company’s turbines — enough to power 280,000 homes — run without emission controls in an area that leads Tennessee in asthma hospitalizations.
MEMPHIS, Tennessee — Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.
None of the 35 methane gas turbines that help power xAI’s massive supercomputer is equipped with pollution controls typically required by federal rules.
The company has no Clean Air Act permits.
In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road. That’s according to calculations by the Southern Environmental Law Center, a nonpartisan legal advocacy group that focuses on the South, which used turbine manufacturer spec sheets to estimate xAI’s annual emissions and compare them with pollution that other South Memphis plants have reported to the Environmental Protection Agency’s National Emissions Inventory.
The turbines were necessary to get the third version of the company’s AI chatbot up and running in time, Musk said at the product’s launch in February, adding:
We have generators on one side of the building, just trailer after trailer of generators until we can get the utility power to come in.
He has not publicly addressed the pollution concerns and did not respond to requests for comment about the turbines powering the plant and their lack of pollution controls.
Just three miles away is Boxtown, a secluded neighborhood that officially became part of the city of Memphis in 1968, the year that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated at the Lorraine Motel downtown. While the annexation had come with the promise of connecting Boxtown to municipal utilities, many homes still had no running water or sewage service as late as the 1970s.
Today, more than 90 percent of residents living in Boxtown’s ZIP code are Black, with a median household income of $36,000, according to the Census Bureau. It’s also home to more than 17 industrial facilities — some of which share an industrial park with xAI — that release enough toxic pollution to require registration with EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory.
Boxtown resident Alexis Humphreys said through tears, holding up her asthma inhaler during a public hearing about the turbines on April 25,
I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside,
“How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?”
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‘How come I can’t breathe?’: Musk’s data canter draws a backlash in Memphis, source
