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The facility Elon Musk is using to power his massive AI "supercomputer" is visibly emitting fumes into an area of Memphis already disproportionately impacted by harmful environmental pollution, NPR reports.
Musk announced the AI-focused supercomputer, dubbed Colossus, in an X-formerly-Twitter post. Built to power his AI venture xAI, the supercomputer is said by Musk to run on 100,000 powerful Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs), or the chips largely used by AI companies to power their AI models.
Musk claims that the facility took just 122 days to build, and that he hopes to double its size in just the next few months. Per NPR, the main goal of the facility is to power Grok, xAI's text and image generator.
But generative AI tools like Grok use a lot of energy. According to NPR, Musk's Colossus facility is powered in part by 18 methane gas generators, none of which the billionaire obtained a permit for.
Already, these gas generators are spewing smoky fumes into the surrounding area's air — ringing major alarm bells for a community already suffering from disproportionately high rates of cancer and much lower life expectancy than surrounding areas due to outsized levels of pollution.
"They have a very serious air pollution problem," Amanda Garcia, a senior attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, told NPR. "Southwest Memphis is ground zero."
At What Cost
Worse, as Forbes first reported in July, city officials who were aware of the facility signed restrictive non-disclosure agreements about the build — meaning the facility wasn't just built lightning-fast, but without the input or even knowledge of community members who will bear its physical and environmental consequences.
"We have been deemed by xAI not even valuable enough to have a conversation with," KeShaun Pearson, president of the area nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, told NPR. "To not even be included in conversations about what is transpiring in our own backyards." Per the report, Pearson grew up just a few miles away from where the xAI facility is now.
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."
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