World’s largest artificial intelligence data centers bring Boxtown massive air pollution, water use and energy demand
What’s up with the Billionaire Boys and their ever-bigger projects? Jeff Bezos’ “Koru” is the world’s largest sailing yacht (417 feet). President Donald Trump’s proposed ballroom (90,000 square feet) is almost twice the size of the White House itself. And SpaceX’s Starship is “the largest rocket ever” (403 feet).
Now comes a fight over the latest gargantuan initiative by Elon Musk: xAI’s Colossus 2, the world’s largest AI supercomputer data center in Memphis. Among more than 5,000 data centers already operating in the U.S., xAI’s Colossus 2 stands out for its size. Designed as the world’s largest, it will house nearly a million NVIDIA chips.
This digital beast will train the company’s Grok AI chatbot and add exponential power to Musk’s social media platform X. It will also eventually operate at a gigawatt scale, consuming energy equal to 40 percent of the energy consumption of Memphis on an average day. When completed, it will use up to one million gallons of water daily.
‘2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides per year’
The Southern Environmental Law Center said Colossus 2’s 35 gas turbines “have the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (“NOx”) per year and numerous other harmful pollutants, worsening Memphis’ already poor air quality… (and) formaldehyde, which is regulated as a HAP (Hazardous AIR Pollutant) because it is both carcinogenic and it causes acute respiratory inflammation.”
Community groups are stepping up opposition, noting the Shelby County Health Department again permitted installation of gas turbines without doing an environmental impact study, and xAI again — just as it had on Colossus 1, the vast supercomputer/data center that xAI built last year — installed many more turbines than permitted, according to video and photos captured by Oilfield Witness and others.
“Allowing a business to pollute the air with NOx (nitrogen oxide) and formaldehyde for nearly one year with no permit or regulatory oversight is egregious,” LaTricea Adams, founder and president of Young, Gifted, and Green, said at a recent press conference. “We demand air permitting reform in Shelby County,” Adams said during the news conference. “We demand an end to ‘sacrifice zones’ in Black communities…”
xAI put the world’s two largest data centers in mostly poor and Black neighborhoods
xAI built Colossus 1 — then the world’s largest data center — last year in the Boxtown neighborhood in South Memphis, an historically poor and Black section, and the even bigger Colossus 2 in just six months this year in the neighboring Whitehaven / Tulane Road / Southaven area — communities that haven’t had the political power to block them despite local efforts.
I paid a visit to both of these Colossi recently. Coming up to Colossus 2 from Mississippi on Highway 61, you turn onto Stateline Road, the street that marks the border between Mississippi and Tennessee. I crossed a remnant of Old Highway 61, the mythical “blues highway” on which so many musicians have traveled north from the Delta. Otis Redding Park is nearby and that Al Green’s Full Gospel Tabernacle Church is just up the road from Colossus 2.
A home to Otis Redding, Elvis Presley, Al Green, Jerry Lee Lewis, even Bob Dylan
Elvis’s Graceland is just a bit further north. On the Mississippi side, Jerry Lee Lewis’s Ranch, now a tourist attraction, sits a few miles south. The importance of Highway 61 as a valuable cultural heritage byway was underscored again, recently, in the biopic A Complete Unknown, which showed Bob Dylan beginning to record the iconic album, Highway 61 Revisited. Its musical heritage is a unique asset to Memphis.
The straight but hilly Stateline Road is flanked by old growth forest and thick plant growth, watery sloughs, and slicing ravines, reminders of the early Memphis swamp landscape. It’s a landscape out of William Faulkner’s Absalom Absalom, a novel about clearing the primordial wilds of Mississippi to establish a profitable plantation. You wouldn’t know you were at the city limits of a Memphis metropolitan area of 1.4 million population.
After white flight, heavy industry moves in
These undeveloped stretches were suddenly broken up by relatively new housing developments on either side of the road just before you arrive at Colossus 2. On the left, within Memphis city limits, is an area called Whitehaven. On the right, over the state line in Mississippi, is Southaven. Both areas are the result of white flight in the 1960s, when school desegregation and then the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s murder prompted much of the city’s white population to move out to new suburbs.
So much for history: there’s not much to see from xAI’s official address, 5420 Tulane Road, a narrow lane with thick growth crowding the edges of pavement. There’s an almost hidden turnoff for a driveway for deliveries, flanked by a “Private Property/No Trespassing” sign wired to a chain link fence. Musk has said that he deliberately sited the new, enormous plant within Memphis city limits because he intended to be a “good citizen”– paying taxes, donating to local charities, and providing jobs.
“Macrohard” – Musk’s boyish mockery of Microsoft
And you certainly can’t see the logo “MACROHARD” painted on the roof of the behemoth building in letters so big that they can be easily read from outer space. Is this the unsubtle boast of a man who has allegedly fathered “at least” 14 children?
Musk admits the moniker is a cheeky jibe at Microsoft but claims that Colossus 2 is a project that will supersede “all operations” of that company with its unprecedented AI power.
In scale, Colossus 2 definitely supersedes Colossus 1, which is located near the Mississippi River in a seriously desolate industrial wasteland, near a Valero oil refinery and a Tennessee Valley Authority gas plant. When I step out of my car for a look around, the air is acrid and the nonstop noise from whining gas turbines and other nearby facilities is annoying in both pitch and volume. The center is surrounded by a chain link fence mounted with surveillance cameras. It is not a place to linger — I am rushed along by several large trucks hogging the road and honking me on my way.
Boxtown is ground zero for the world’s two biggest data centers
It’s a 12-mile drive from Colossus 2 to Colossus 1. Along the way, the route leads through the heart of Boxtown. This neighborhood began in 1863 as a community of emancipated slaves or “freedmen.” It existed outside of Memphis city limits until the 1960s. Then, the city annexed Boxtown with largely unfulfilled promises of city services, including fire and police, sewer lines and street lights and signs, and redevelopment funds that were supposed to help pay for modern housing. As recently as 1979, however, 50 percent of its households made under $3,000 annually. Roads were dirt, houses lacked indoor plumbing, water, and electricity, and there was no public transportation to connect Boxtown to the rest of Memphis.
Today, in Boxtown’s zip code, the median household income is about $37,000; about half of its 2,865 residents earn less than $25,000 per year. The poverty rate is twice that of the city as a whole. And Memphis already is not a wealthy city.
A neighborhood targeted for heavy industry
Due to its predominately Black population, poverty, and unfilled city promises to implement improvements, Boxtown has long been a target for unwanted industrial development. In 2019, an oil pipeline was planned to cross through the area after it was referred to as the “path of least resistance.” This roused the residents of Boxtown to protest until the project was cancelled in 2021.
Now, residents are pushing back against the twin xAI supercomputers that bracket the community to the west and east. Their principal complaint: toxic air and noise pollution from the dozens of giant methane gas turbines used to power the facility. These trailer-size power units are unregulated because xAI persuaded local officials they should be classed as “temporary-mobile,” requiring no oversight or environmental impact review as long as they operate for less than a year.
2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides per year
In a letter to the Shelby County Health Department last spring, the SELC said “xAI (i.e. Colossus 1) emits between 1,200 and 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides (NOx) per year — which are supposed to be limited by EPA standards — making the facility likely the largest industrial emitter of NOx in Memphis.” The letter noted that “exposure to high levels of nitrogen oxides, which are precursors to ozone formation, have been associated with higher risk of death from respiratory disease,” not to mention other health and environmental effects. Now, projections are that the even bigger Colossus 2 will add as much or more of such toxic chemicals to Boxtown’s air.
Memphis already “has some of the worst air quality in the region,” SELC notes. “In 2024, Memphis was deemed an asthma capital of the nation by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America due to high rates of emergency room visits and deaths from asthma.” And residents say Boxtown is the worst possible neighborhood to pump even more pollutants into. “Prior to xAI, we were dealing with more of a waste smell. Like poop. This is more like a chemical-type smell,” said Sarah Gladney, a Boxtown resident.
A proposed new law targets high-demand energy users
Resistance to these twin Collossi is building. The “Clean Cloud Act,” new federal legislation proposed by U.S. Representative Steve Cohen (D-TN) and several others, would establish an air emissions baseline for high-demand energy users such as data centers and crypto currency miners. “The law would require a new annual report showing all of the country’s data centers and crypto miners. It would incentivize clean power development, and invest in zero-carbon electricity and battery storage. Finally, the Clean Cloud Act would make that new power available to residential customers through affordability programs,” reports The Memphis Flyer.
“Memphis already hosts significant data-center and data-processing operations, and more companies are looking to the Mid-South because of our strategic location,” said Cohen.
The Shelby County Health Department confirmed in September, 2024 that it received a $411,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to build a new air monitoring station in South Memphis, but more than a year later, delays in construction have been blamed on the recent federal government shutdown.
The 38109 zip code faces industrial pollution from the Valero Refinery, the Tennessee Valley Authority’s Allen Combined Cycle Plant, and new natural-gas turbines being used by xAI to power its two Memphis Colossus supercomputers. The health department in July approved an air quality permit allowing xAI to continue burning gas, despite locals complaining xAI had been illegally operating 35 turbines, not the 15 it had obtained approval for. The next day, a Code Orange air quality alert reported pollution levels that could pose health risks.
Community groups step up the fight
Local nonprofits are calling for action. In response to a city air quality test that claimed to have found “no dangerous levels” of air pollutants, and that a Yale expert and residents said was deeply flawed in part because it didn’t consider the direction of the wind, Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) in July announced a $250,000 investment to install nine air quality monitoring devices, in partnership with the Maryland-based Center for Engagement, Environmental Justice and Health (CEEJH). “The winds were not coming from the direction that would have carried the emissions. The design was just flawed.” – Krystal Pollitt of the Yale School of Public Health on a Memphis air quality test.
To deal with water usage issues, Protect Our Aquifer (POA) has taken up the issue of xAI’s water use. POA was founded in 2016 to protect the water for Memphis — the largest city in the US that relies solely on groundwater to meet residential, industrial, and agricultural water demands. While noting that the company has set up a wastewater recycling facility near Colossus 1 to replace fresh water originally drawn from the aquifer that services Boxtown drinking wells, it is pushing for “a fair fee” that xAI should pay for wastewater access and investments in workforce development for Memphians “focused in nearby communities.”
Concerns about air and noise pollution from the two Memphis facilities have spread across Stateline Road to neighboring Southaven, Mississippi, where xAI has set up multiple natural gas turbines on the site of a former power plant to fuel Colossus 2. Currently, 18 turbines are running; the company has applied to the state to operate another 41.
Mississippi defers to the EPA, which remains silent
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) said it adopted emissions and noise standards used by the EPA. But in a statement to Mississippi Today, the EPA did not address whether MDEQ had properly applied current federal standards. “EPA is working expeditiously to issue a final rule,” said the agency.
Southaven residents, too, are beginning to push back. “This isn’t some far away industrial site, this is smack in the middle of a suburban area,”said lifelong Southaven resident Shannon Samsa. “I can’t live here like this,” Jason Haley told Mississippi Today, complaining about the noise and air pollution. “It’s going to drive me crazy.”
The rapid growth of such super-scale facilities as xAI’s plants is being driven by a technological gold rush as tech companies scramble to capture market share. Predictably, this largely unregulated, mammoth-scale “progress” comes with equally epic environmental and health issues, often unloaded on poorer, marginalized communities that don’t have the political power to fight them off.
Dealing with the problems as well as the promise of AI caused by such decisions looks to be a major challenge for communities in coming years, all across the United States.
Article by John Howell, a writer, editor, and broadcaster who advises on communications and media strategy. He was co-founder, editorial director, and chief of thought leadership for 3BL Media, for which he managed all original editorial content, wrote, and edited newsletters, and created the Brands Taking Stands initiative. He has worked as an editor and contributor for Elle, Artforum, and High Times magazines, developed new media for Hearst Magazines, and created communications for Calvin Klein, Polo/Ralph Lauren, and The Body Shop. He lives and works in New Hampshire and Maine.
Article reprinted with Permission as part of GreenMoney’s ongoing collaboration with Climate and Capital Media.
