Elon Musk‘s massive AI supercomputer is clearly

causing havoc in the surrounding community.

According to NPR, Elon Musk’s enormous AI “supercomputer” facility is clearly releasing fumes into a part of Memphis that is already disproportionately affected by dangerous environmental pollution.

Musk revealed the AI-focused supercomputer, known as Colossus, last week in a post on X that was formerly Twitter. The supercomputer, which Musk built to power his AI business xAI, is rumored to run on 100,000 potent Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), or the chips that AI companies mostly employ to power their AI models.

Musk states that he plans to double the facility’s capacity in the next months, claiming that it was built in just 122 days. The primary objective of the facility, according to NPR, is to fuel Grok, xAI’s text and image generator.

However, Grok and other generative AI technologies are energy-intensive. NPR reports that Musk’s Colossus plant is partially powered by eighteen methane gas generators, none of which required a permission, according to the billionaire. These gas generators are already releasing smokey fumes into the surrounding air, raising serious concerns for a community that already experiences disproportionately high cancer rates and significantly shorter life expectancies than neighboring areas as a result of excessive pollution.

Even worse, as Forbes first revealed in July, city officials who were aware of the facility signed strict non-disclosure agreements regarding its construction. This means that the facility wasn’t just built quickly; rather, it was done so without the community’s input or knowledge, who will ultimately be responsible for its environmental and physical effects.

According to KeShaun Pearson, president of the local charity Memphis Community Against Pollution, “we have been deemed by xAI not even valuable enough to have a conversation with,” RPR said. “To not even be included in conversations about what is transpiring in our own backyards.” As per the article, Pearson was born and raised a short distance from the current location of the xAI facility.

Musk has a history of skirting environmental regulations, so none of this is exactly surprising.
But like many other communities throughout the US, South Memphis is already a place where the health and lives of residents have effectively been sacrificed for the sake of heavily polluting industries. Regardless, Musk and xAI are quickly charging ahead and for what? A chatbot that swears sometimes?

“Artificial intelligence may be a cutting-edge technology,” Garcia told NPR. “But it’s imposing the same kinds of pollution burdens on communities that industrial sources have been for the past 100 years.”