Sarah Gladney first smelled the pungent odor on a recent morning outside her home in Boxtown, a predominantly Black community in southwest Memphis.
It wasn’t the “rotten cabbage” smell that was familiar to Gladney and her neighbors. This odor was more chemical, and she told “MLK 50: Justice Through Journalism” that she believes it emanates from the billionaire’s supercomputer located just one mile away from her home.
“What do you have to compare to say that our health is not affected?” said Gladney, who’s lived in the neighborhood for 20 years and calls herself the “new kid on the block.” “Our health is our wealth.”
In early April, the Southern Environmental Law Center reported that the Elon Musk-owned xAI supercomputer plant, dubbed Colossus, is powered by methane gas-burning turbines, which dump their exhaust into Boxtown and Southwest Memphis. The SELC found 35 gas turbines on the site, more than double the 15 that local officials had previously known since the facility opened in July.
The site is located in a main building the size of roughly 13 football fields. There, approximately 200,000 graphics processing units are housed to train Grok, Musk’s AI bot. According to NBC News, Musk was able to bring Colossus online in just 122 days and double its size in less than a year.
But that comes with a high cost. The SELC found the plant’s turbines “are violating critical limits on Hazardous Air Pollutants.” Such turbines emit formaldehyde, which can cause “acute respiratory inflammation.” These turbines also emit the hazardous pollutant nitrogen oxide, which is also linked to respiratory issues and smog formation.
In 2024, the county earned an “F” in ozone pollution prevention from the American Lung Association. For folks with asthma, Memphis is the 15th-most challenging place to live in America, according to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.
Boxtown resident Alexis Humphreys, 27, a third-generation asthma sufferer, told representatives from the Shelby County Health Department and Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, “I can’t breathe at home, it smells like gas outside.”
“How come I can’t breathe at home and y’all get to breathe at home?” she asked at a recent town hall.
The cumulative cancer rate is four times the national average, studies have found. The life expectancy of people living in District 9, which encompasses 38109 and three other ZIP codes in and around Boxtown, is lowest in the country.
And more problems are on the horizon. Bloomberg reports Colossus will also be using more electricity and water than is currently available in the city, according to the local utility provider, Memphis Light, Gas, and Water.
“We deserve to breathe clean air just like the communities out east,” Gladney said.
In late April, community members aired their concerns in a packed meeting to fight xAI’s permit approval. The plant’s senior manager, Brent Mayo, assured them its turbines would be equipped with technology to lower emissions, making it the “lowest-emitting facility in the country.”
But Musk-owned companies have spotty reputations when it comes to maintaining environmental standards. Tesla, in California, and SpaceX, in Texas, have run afoul of regulators but have denied wrongdoing, NBC News reports.
But federal interference is not expected to be an issue for Musk, who has forged a close alliance with President Donald Trump. The new administration has already neutered the enforcement arm of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Meanwhile, Boxtown officials are touting the economic benefits xAI brings to the community.
Memphis Mayor Paul Young notes the tax revenue Musk’s supercomputer will bring and how the company is planning to build a water recycling facility.
But The Daily Memphian reports that the company is being taxed on a total investment of $2.2 billion, far shy of the $12 billion previously promised by the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce. Ted Townsend, president of the chamber, said the $33 million in tax revenue to the city and the county will still make xAI its second-largest taxpayer behind FedEx.
But Boxtown residents say you can’t put a price on good health.
Easter Knox, who lives just two miles from xAI, remembers when the since-closed Allen Fossil Plant left behind pits of toxic coal ash that the Tennessee Valley Authority only began removing in 2021. The Valero Memphis Refinery is also in the neighborhood, refining oil next to a public park. In 2021 and 2023, gas flaring at the facility released toxins into the air.
“They don’t need to be sending all this different pollution, the formaldehyde and the gas,” said Knox, 74, who moved to Boxtown in 1977. “We got a good little area, and I just really hate they’re bringing all these things to our area.”
The community pressure seems to be working. Through the Greater Memphis Chamber, xAI recently announced plans to remove some of the turbines within two months.
And no gas turbines will be used at the 1-million-square-foot site in Whitehaven owned by the company.
KeShaun Pearson, president of Memphis Community Against Pollution, said the working-class neighborhood will not be the “easy target” it has been in the past.
“They always come to southwest Memphis,” Pearson said. “They always come to what they believe is the path of least resistance.”
He vows to carry on the fight against xAI.
“Until we see all of the turbines removed from South Memphis, there’s nothing to celebrate, and there’s nothing to believe,” he said. “We believe in facts down here.”
“A decade of continued failure has to end here with this illegal pollution of our community. We are not a sacrifice zone for the profits of a Billionaire with Technocratic fantasies. Sacrificing our health for the ambitions of an oligarch who doesn’t live here or care about us is insane,” he said in a Facebook post.
