Mr. Musk Goes To Memphis — And Poisons Its Air

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Last Updated on: 27th April 2025, 04:04 pm

When Elon Musk isn’t running Tesla into the ground, giving Nazi salutes at political events, flying rockets backward, or personally overseeing the dismantling of the US government, he fills his idle moments spawning more offspring and running the show at xAI— his personal answer to the artificial intelligence revolution. For reasons that are unclear, xAI is building a gigantic data center he modestly dubbed Colossus in Memphis, Tennessee.

Why? Who knows why Musk does anything? The original building is a former Electrolux factory that has been vacant for a long time. Maybe he got a good deal on the rent or maybe he couldn’t wait to build a new facility. For whatever reason, Memphis was chosen and the mayor couldn’t be happier.

Hizzoner is gloating because a major property that was laying fallow is now providing fresh tax revenues for the city, but the people who live in the area are not feeling quite so happy. They say Colossus is dumping huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the air they breath, along with lots of other pollutants. Methane does burn cleaner than coal, but that doesn’t mean you want to stick your mouth over the exhaust pipe of a methane generator and inhale.

There still are fine particulates in the exhaust stream, which are known to cause significant health issues. 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.

By now, everyone is well aware that the data centers powering the artificial intelligence movement are voracious consumers of electricity. A few years ago, people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off because electric cars were going to crash the utility grid. But now that AI is sucking up far more electrons than EVs ever could, everybody is okay with that. (There may be a lesson there somewhere about how industries influence public opinion.)

Memphis does not have enough electrical energy available to meet the needs of Colossus — not even close. So the great and powerful Musk has arranged to have portable methane powered generators brought in to supply the juice it needs. The problem, the neighbors say, is that Musk neglected to obtain the necessary permits to operate them before turning them on.

Musk Comes To Memphis

Things came to a head earlier this month when the Southern Environmental Law Center disclosed that xAI had quietly moved in at least 35 portable methane gas turbines without air permits to help power its supercomputer. The group says that many generators could power an entire city and are enormous emitters of toxic and carcinogenic pollution. According to The Guardian, SELC made the discovery by taking satellite images of the Colossus 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 is a champion for xAI in Memphis, partly because it is pumping money into city coffers and partly because he does not live downwind of the gigantic data center. He said the company has a pending permit application with the Shelby County health department to run 15 generators. Sharp-eyed readers will note that permits are supposed to be obtained beforehand. Most of us don’t build a house and apply for a building permit after it is finished, but Musk feels he is not constrained by such legal niceties.

“There are 35, but there are only 15 that are on,” Young said. “The other ones are stored on the site.” But the Southern Environmental Law Center has taken new photos of Colossus using thermal imaging. Those photos show 33 turbines giving off significant amounts of heat, which suggests they were in use at the time the photo was taken. So somebody is lying. CleanTechnica readers, who are all above average, can decide for themselves who is credible and who is not.

“It is appalling that xAI would operate more than 30 methane gas turbines without any permits or any public oversight,” Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, told The Guardian. “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.”

For The Love Of Grok

What is happening at xAI is the development of an artificial intelligence system Elon has named Grok. According to Wikipedia, Grok is a generative artificial intelligence chatbot developed by xAI. Based on the large language model of the same name, it was launched in 2023 by Elon Musk. The chatbot is advertised as having a “sense of humor” and has direct access to Musk anti-social media platform known as X. Musk co-founded the AI research organization OpenAI with Sam Altman in 2015, but left the company’s board in 2018, saying he “didn’t agree with some of what OpenAI team wanted to do.”

OpenAI went on to launch ChatGPT in 2022, and GPT-4 in March 2023. That same month, Musk was one of several individuals who signed the “Pause Giant AI Experiments” open letter from the Future of Life Institute. It called for a six-month pause in the development of any AI software more powerful than GPT-4. In April 2023, Musk said in an interview on Tucker Carlson Tonight that he intended to develop an AI chatbot called “TruthGPT,” which he described as “a maximum truth seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe.”

Musk expressed his concern to Carlson that ChatGPT was being “trained to be politically correct.” TruthGPT would later become known as “Grok,” a verb coined by Robert A. Heinlein in his 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land to describe a form of understanding. Truth is a slippery concept. Elon insists he is a “free speech absolutist,” but then throttles conversations on X that do not conform to his version of the truth. He also has instructed his underlings to boost his posts because he, like the alleged president, thinks his views are always correct and should get the most attention.

Colossus And Its Discontents

Stephen Smith, who has led the Southern Alliance For Clean Energy for more than 30 years, has some concerns about Colossus and its impact on the community. When xAI revealed that it planned to increase in size by a factor of ten, he said, “Even more concerning is the fact that we are far from convinced that xAI didn’t know when they first came to Memphis that they would expand the plans 10x.

“This is a classic bait and switch — xAI proposed one thing, and grew support from stakeholders like the Greater Memphis Chamber, the Memphis Shelby County Economic Development Growth Engine (EDGE), TVA, and governing authorities. Musk and crew moved forward on the path to operating the facility, and only then announced a change in magnitude that creates a fundamentally different situation for public health in Memphis, economic stability for ratepayers, and environmental security.”

The current peak demand for the entire city of Memphis is around 3 GW. Supplying Colossus will require the equivalent of a new nuclear or combined cycle methane-fired generating station just to meet the needs of this one customer. “TVA will now have to contemplate building a power plant just to serve this one facility. The unanswered question is who pays for the new generation?” Smith asks.

“Our original hope with the original 150 MW level facility was that Musk would use his engineering expertise to bring Tesla Megapacks with solar and storage capability to make this facility a model of clean, renewable energy. It would be good to hear if there is an expansion to the facility that there’s a scalable commitment to renewable energy and storage.”

What Smith fails to understand is that Musk doesn’t care a flying fig leaf about clean energy. He cares about imposing his will on others and profiting from doing so. The hearing next week will drone on and, more than likely, a supine board will make a decision favoring Musk. Objectors will then appeal and the process will take years to work its way though the courts. Meanwhile, those methane generators will keep spinning and sending clouds of toxic air over communities that don’t have the political power that Musk has.

Eventually, Musk will get everything he wants, just as he always does. When you are the richest person in human history, things have a way of going your way. The plan is to run out the clock, something people with truckloads of cash and an army of lawyers do all the time. In the end, all of this will do nothing more than provide Musk with yet another platform that dispenses truth as Musk understands it to be. Sleep tight, America.