In the city that built the blues, Elon Musk’s xAI data center has been given permission to keep polluting the air with fumes from burning methane gas — which it had already been doing so without authorization for a year.
As Wired reports, Memphis’ local health department has granted an air permit for the xAI data center, allowing it to keep operating the methane gas turbines that power Musk’s Grok chatbot and Colossus, the gigantic supercomputer at its heart.
In Boxtown, the historically Black neighborhood in South Memphis where xAI’s data center is situated, Musk’s unfettered pollution has ripped the band-aid off a wound that had barely begun to heal. As Capital B News reported earlier this year, the neighborhood was once home to the Allen Fossil Plant, an electrical facility that left pits of noxious coal ash and a lengthy legacy of environmental racism behind when it was forced to close in 2018…