Elon Musk’s new AI data center has turned a formerly quiet Mississippi town into a noisy nightmare.
The $20 billion facility, run by Musk’s AI firm xAI, is powered by 27 methane gas turbines that run day and night, belching fumes and emitting a constant noise like jet engines, NBC News reports. The turbines were trucked in because Southaven, the unsuspecting rural community that Musk chose to build the data center in, can’t provide the electricity the facility needs.
And, of course, the rapid pace of the AI industry can’t stop to wait for more sustainable energy options to be built up — or to hear out the protests of locals who are alarmed at how the tranquility of their town was blown up practically overnight by an installation that feels like it was designed by Sauron himself. The noise drove resident Krystal Polk to move out of her home which her family owned during a time when many Black families were still sharecropping, she told NBC News…