Elon Musk
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Inside the Memphis Community Battling Elon Musk’s xAI
ve days after Elon Musk’s Grok 4 became one of the most powerful large language models in the world, Alexis Humphreys had her first severe asthma attack in 15 years. She laid down in her house in Boxtown, Memphis in the humid, sticky summer, struggling to breathe, inhaling a smell of gas that had started wafting into her neighborhood about a year before. “It felt like my chest was caving in,” Humphreys, 28, says on her front porch a couple of days later.
Environmentalists and community activists say this is no coincidence. Boxtown, a predominantly Black community with a median income of $37,000, sits a few miles from where Musk, driven by ambitions of creating an AI smarter than humans, set up the self-proclaimed biggest supercomputer in the world last year. The supercomputer, named Colossus, consisted of a staggering 230,000 Nvidia GPUs, a sheer training power that allowed Musk to vault past his competitors in key benchmarks. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, another AI titan, praised Musk’s rapid buildout of the site as “superhuman.”
But all of those computers need a vast amount of energy to run. Fueling them has been 35 unpermitted temporary gas turbines, which have been pumping out a level of emissions that, according to environmentalists, is exacerbating the health issues of an area already crushed by decades of pollution.