(C) Tennessee Lookout
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A billionaire, an AI supercomputer, toxic emissions and a Memphis community that did nothing wrong • Tennessee Lookout [1]
['Ren Brabenec', 'Rev. Earle Fisher', 'Tyler Foster', 'More From Author', 'July', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Coauthors.Is-Layout-Flow', 'Class', 'Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus', 'Display Inline', '.Wp-Block-Co-Authors-Plus-Avatar']
Date: 2025-07-07
Class dynamics influence the environments in which humans live, yet when this topic arises, it’s almost always framed as a global issue. For example, anthropologist Jason Hickel recently published a now-viral map displaying how, by the year 2070, two billion people will be residing in regions exposed to extreme, potentially unlivable heat.
Approximately 99.7% of those people will be in the Global South, a grouping of poor, formerly colonized nations primarily in Latin America, Africa, and parts of Asia that are responsible for less than 20% of historical carbon dioxide emissions, meaning the people who have contributed the least to planetary warming will be the ones who suffer the most from it.
Though the United States is a wealthy country firmly entrenched in the Global North, there are rarely discussed yet very similar class dynamics playing out within our nation’s borders, including in Memphis.
What’s happening in Memphis?
Once a green energy advocate, tech billionaire Elon Musk shifted his focus to the artificial intelligence arms race and established “Colossus” in Memphis in 2024. An xAI supercomputer facility designed to power and train Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, Colossus is slated to be the world’s largest supercomputer.
But at what cost? The facility is currently operating 33 methane-powered gas turbines to fuel its AI technology despite holding a permit for only 15. The supercomputer facility is located in a poor, predominantly Black Memphis community with historically high rates of pollution-related illness and disproportionate rates of industrial pollutants.
The magnitude of the energy draw — and resulting pollution — at Colossus is, well, colossal. According to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC), the facility draws enough electricity to power approximately 100,000 homes while consuming 1.5 million gallons of water per day to cool its equipment.
Those inputs are alarming, but the outputs are even worse. The facility’s behemoth methane gas turbines increase Memphis’s smog by 30-60% as they belch planet-warming nitrogen oxides and poisonous formaldehyde around the clock, pollutants linked to respiratory and cardiovascular disease. Quoting SELC, “xAI has been operating dozens of unpermitted methane gas turbines without public notice, permits, or air pollution controls. The number of turbines and extent of their emissions likely make xAI the largest industrial source of smog-forming pollutant in Memphis.”
It’s worth mentioning that clean air is both a Constitutional right, according to the 9th Amendment, and a human right, as per the United Nations; yet, Memphis leadership has looked the other way as Colossus produces more nitrogen oxides than Shelby County’s Draslovka chemical plant, the Valero refinery, TVA’s Allen power plant, and the Memphis International Airport combined.
South Memphis is becoming a sacrifice zone
“It’s no coincidence that if you are African American in this country, you’re 75% more likely to live near a toxic hazardous waste facility,” said state Rep. Justin J. Pearson, a Memphis Democrat, in a recent interview. “It’s no accident that in this community, we’re four times more likely to have cancer in our bodies. It’s no accident that in this community, there are over 17 Toxics Release Inventory facilities surrounding us — now 18 with Elon Musk’s xAI plant.”
Despite vocal opposition from South Memphis residents and their defenders, these neighborhoods are beginning to look like “sacrifice zones,” or poor, predominantly Black communities that are willfully poisoned and polluted for the interests of power and wealth.
How long before South Memphis looks like Louisiana’s Cancer Alley, a stretch of communities along the Mississippi River where a slew of dangerous petrochemical facilities have led to the predominantly African American neighborhoods presenting cancer rates at up to 50 times the national average? Or Flint, Michigan, where the preventable 2014 water crisis caused lead contamination that disproportionately affected the region’s mostly low-income population, leading to several deaths and thousands of lifetime disabilities?
The people who contribute the least to environmental harm often suffer the most from it
Although it varies by region, poor Americans produce approximately 10 tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year. In contrast, wealthy Americans have significantly larger carbon and pollution footprints due to their consumption patterns, investments, and lifestyle. One study found that the wealthiest 10% of Americans account for at least 40% of emissions.
Yet, despite their disproportionate contribution to the problem, the wealthy can afford to insulate themselves from the harms associated with living on an increasingly warm and polluted planet.
For example, Musk’s private jet flights alone produce approximately 5,497 tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is equivalent to the amount produced by around 550 residents of South Memphis in a year. Every time Musk’s SpaceX launches another rocket (currently about 140 per year), add another 3,189 tons of CO2, or the annual carbon footprint equivalent of 319 South Memphis residents. Musk’s Boring Company, initially pitched as a sustainable alternative to above-ground automobile traffic, is likely to produce tunnels that, car for car, produce eight times more CO2 emissions than roads.
Yet Musk will never have to suffer the environmental harms created by his businesses and lifestyle.
Memphis’s future should be decided by those who live there, not an out-of-state billionaire
Laws like the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and federal agencies like the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) used to make a not insignificant attempt at insulating poor American communities from the environmental implications of class dynamics, but all of that could change with Supreme Court rulings gutting environmental laws and DOGE-mandated cuts to the EPA.
What’s happening in Memphis is a painful example of America’s shift to a law-of-the-jungle society in which a billionaire can flaunt already gutted and barely enforceable laws and then operate an unpermitted, clandestine, mass-polluting supercomputer facility simply because no one has the resources, power structures, or political will to stop him.
I hope, and still believe, that Tennesseans won’t take that lying down.
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