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‘See You in Federal Court’: Black Memphis Residents Have Had Enough of Elon Musk

Forces behind xAI supercomputer facility accused of compounding pollution and lies  


Residents near Elon Musk's  oxides-of-nitrogen-and-formaldehyde-emitting gas turbines report burning air. image credit: Pexels.com/ Ron Lach + Sirita Render
Residents near Elon Musk's oxides-of-nitrogen-and-formaldehyde-emitting gas turbines report burning air. image credit: Pexels.com/ Ron Lach + Sirita Render

Tech billionaire Elon Musk is developing a massive xAI supercomputer facility in Memphis to power and train Musk’s AI chatbot Grok, frequently used by X (i.e., Twitter) users to undermine online arguments and snappy comebacks. 

But critics say Musk’s “Colossus” facility is ducking local permit allowances and dumping pollution on an underserved Black community already suffering historically high rates of pollution-related illness and disproportionate rates of industrial pollutants. 

“You’d think the people at the state level would want to keep alive the geese that lay their golden eggs, be it Memphis or places like Jackson, Mississippi... You’d think they’d want it to be as prosperous as it could be, yet they’re doing things to hold these cities back."

A legion of high-powered processors demands considerable electricity, however, and Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) says Musk’s company lied to city officials when it claimed it was operating only 15 pollution-spewing gas turbines to power Colossus. The turbines emit NOx (oxides of nitrogen) and formaldehyde, and residents have been complaining of burning air and discomfort. When SELC partnered with SouthWings to do a flyover of the facility they discovered 35 gas turbines at the datacenter in aerial photographs, not 15.  


“xAI has been operating dozens of unpermitted methane gas turbines without public notice, permits, or air pollution controls,” SELC claims. It adds that the city of Memphis appears to be unprepared to contend with the scope of disinformation coming from the company. 

“The back-and-forth about how many gas turbines are at the xAI data center and how many are running really underscores the lack of accountability surrounding this facility,” said SELC Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia. “This is information that local leaders and health officials should know and should be communicating to people living nearby. We shouldn’t have to do a flyover for communities to find out what’s going on down the road.”  

Last year, Musk’s company claimed the gas turbines were “temporary,” but xAI is now applying for permits that would allow for 15 turbines to run 24/7 for the next 5 years, at least — and that permit makes no mention of the additional turbines it has already failed to disclose to city officials. 

In June, SELC sent xAI a formal notice on behalf of the NAACP to stop running the gas turbines, or they’ll “see you in federal court.” 

 

They lied, but that’s just business 

"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,” state Rep. Justin J. Pearson told the Tennessee Lookout. “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.” 

xAI is not the first company that mislead government officials over the amount of pollution they were dumping on a Black community and then came back and asked those same officials to “endorse the lie” by allowing new pollution. Consider Drax Biomass Inc.’s recent request of Mississippi officials to approve permits allowing them to continue emitting pollution they denied they were dumping in their original permit. 

Particulate matter of 2.5 microns or smaller (PM2.5) can pierce the lung membrane and invade the human bloodstream, and Drax has paid more than $2.7 million in combined fines since 2020 for discharging more than their claimed amount of it. Drax undercounted the scale of their emissions during its first permitting process, using bad numbers from a similar facility that was also later proven to be under-reporting its emissions.  

Likely knowing it is incapable of meeting its understated initial claims, Drax now wants consent from the state of Mississippi to spew up to 245 tons per year of dangerous particulate matter and Volatile Organic Compounds upon its African-American neighbors. More accurate company stack tests revealed the plant had actually produced three times that amount of Volatile Organic Compounds emissions (795 tons per year) than Drax had claimed, far above the federal maximum limit of 249 tons per year. 


The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation discovered in 2004 that, per capita, Black Americans are responsible for 20% fewer greenhouse gas emissions than white people, yet more than 70% of them live in counties that violate federal air pollution standards. Additionally, Black people are also almost three times more likely than white people to die or be hospitalized from respiratory diseases like asthma, according to the Environmental Justice and Climate Change Initiative.   

Polluting industries like coal plants disproportionately target Black neighborhoods. with almost 80 percent of African Americans living within 30 miles of a coal-fired plant, despite Black people only comprising about 13% of the total U.S. population, according to the NAACP. 


But big polluting companies like xAI and Drax and others don’t target Black communities for cancer and other illness specifically because they necessarily hate Black people. There is an economic component at work as well, and those economics pool together to make Black communities desperate to invite polluting industries into their backyards. 



‘Thanks to the Money… ’ 

“The problem is we didn’t do enough to create many other economic opportunities (in Black communities), and that makes us desperate for this, or any, kind of development,” former Memphis District 8 Councilman Martavius Jones told BGX. 

Jerry Wayne Norwood is the Black mayor of the majority-Black community of Gloster, Miss., which houses the DRAX wood pellet plant. Regardless of company officials misleading their neighbors and state officials, Norwood remains committed to the DRAX facility, despite criticism, fines and violations. 

“If by some chance a big lawsuit should happen and Drax decides to close its gates please be prepared for your utility rates to triple,” said Norwood, who poses for photos with DRAX employees on Facebook. “Gloster currently has the lowest utility rates in the area, that's water, gas and sewer, thanks to Drax. Last year alone we collected $251,931 in gas, $70,000 in water and $47,892 in Sewer from Drax.” 

In his Facebook post, Norwood went on to cite a period of low water pressure major power outage after a 30-year-old local water plant generator died. 

“Thanks to the money we collected for Drax, we were able to purchase a brand-new generator at the cost of $102,000,” Norwood wrote. “The Amite County School System received about $400,000 in tax dollars from Drax. As mayor of this town, it's my duty to look out for the health, safety and well-being of our citizens.” 

Critics say Black communities are so historically impoverished their leaders welcome the opportunity to make themselves a “sacrifice zone” for the promise of new jobs. 

“The problem is we didn’t do enough to create many other economic opportunities (in Black communities), and that makes us desperate for this, or any, kind of development,” former Memphis District 8 Councilman Martavius Jones told BGX. 

Jones said state leaders prefer to send the brunt of economic development incentives to wealthier, whiter communities leaving minority-dominated urban centers to fend for themselves. 


“Memphis has always been the red headed stepchild of Tennessee, but more so now,” said Jones. “Normally when we talk about the city and its state, we put a comma between them—'Memphis, Tennessee’. But in Memphis we put a period between Memphis and Tennessee—'Memphis. Tennessee’. If they could de-annex us to Mississippi the state legislature would.” 


Black communities’ resulting desperation for tax revenue — any tax revenue — makes them a target for pollution industries, like Sterilization Services of Tennessee (SST), which are almost never seen in wealthy suburban districts.  

Sterilization Services of Tennessee released dangerous ethylene oxide into Memphis’s Black communities for decades until the Southern Environmental Law Center attorneys joined the Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) and the Mallory Heights Community Development Corporation and pushed the EPA to regulate the hazard. 

 

It was only last year that the company announced it was closing its facility in 2024. But critics say it barely constrained the toxins it belched from its stacks and onto neighborhoods, and it only did that after the EPA admitted Ethylene Oxide (EtO) was 60 times more toxic than expected, causing lymphoma, leukemia and breast cancer. 

“They have to minimize it now, but that’s only because they were required to do it by these federal rules that are now on the chopping block,” Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Patrick Anderson told Black Girl Times. 

Earlier this year, President Donald Trump’s EPA director rolled back those EPA rules on EtOs and other toxins plaguing Black communities. These rollbacks also include dangerous emissions from coal plants, which prefer to squat near Black communities. 

Jones said even after all these years, state leaders still prefer to direct state and federal resources to white territories and leave inner cities to polluting industries, despite major urban communities being the lifeblood of state revenue. 

“You’d think the people at the state level would want to keep alive the geese that lay their golden eggs, be it Memphis or places like Jackson, Mississippi,” said Jones. “You’d think they’d want it to be as prosperous as it could be, yet they’re doing things to hold these cities back. They want to talk about us being a capitalist society, but the biggest form of socialism in this nation is the revenue generated in these cities that help fund the entire state.” 

Jones recounts a conversation he had in New Orleans with the then-leader of the police precinct in the French Quarter.

 

“He once told me that ‘if we only got back a quarter of what we send the state of Louisiana we’d be doing fine,’” Jones recalls. 


Regarding xAI, the Southern Environmental Law Center reports that the Shelby County Health Department will reach a decision on the air permit in a few weeks — but again, that permit does not consider the 20 extra turbines xAI hid from officials.

 

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