The Memphis City Council meeting on Tuesday had already been going on for more than four hours by the time Doug McGowen, the CEO of the city’s public utility, sat down to present. The councilmembers had just received a grim update on the city’s declining annual murder rates, but were rather attentive as McGowen turned the conversation to xAI.
It was last summer when Elon Musk made a surprising foray into my hometown—Memphis, Tenn.—with plans to build a supercomputer. In a matter of months, xAI had set up a computer with 100,000 GPUs in an enormous factory in an industrial district near the Mississippi River—all to train its proprietary large language model, Grok. Tesla megapacks were shipped in , and generators were set up to power the center so it could operate as xAI tried to get on the city’s grid.
But getting onto the city’s grid is easier said than done, as McGowen shared in this week’s City Council meeting. Companies have to file individual requests with the Memphis utility, MLGW, which will then have to turn around and study all potential impacts to the local, regional, and national power grid before it offers a path to move forward. After all, power outages are a huge risk.