A New Polluting Factory Outside Memphis? It's A Supercomputer.
World Changing Technology or Next-Level Toxic Neighbor? Find Out How People In The River City Are Raising Environmental Concerns.
Up to 5 million gallons of water per day.
That’s what estimates say it takes to cool down the supercomputer known as xAI in South Memphis.
It sits on top of the Memphis aquifer, where the groundwater is naturally filtered by sand, slowly over time. Most water pumped from the Memphis aquifer is more than 2,000 years old with low levels of impurities. It’s some of the best drinking water in the world.
A huge factory on top of a clean water source. What could go wrong?
Let’s talk about how we got here.
In June 2024, the Memphis Chamber of Commerce held a press conference to announce a new company coming to town—the world's largest supercomputer called Colossus. It’s meant to provide the computing power for AI searches on X (formerly Twitter), the chatbot Grok, and other forms of machine learning like self-driving cars.
Officials fast-tracked the project not telling neighbors or even local city council members about it, and construction took a breezy 122 days.
xAI is a tech startup owned by Elon Musk, who purchased the former Electrolux building, which stopped production at the facility in 2022. The appliance company makes household items under the brands Electrolux, AEG and Frigidaire.
From the outside, the facility looks like any other large warehouse, but the smell hits you even from a distance. The arrival of this supercomputer has impacted the neighborhood, a historically Black area already plagued with pollution problems.
Lawyer, social scientist, and political snarkologist Elizabeth Booker Houston recently talked about the facility in her hometown.
From a business standpoint, the deal is considered the most significant capital investment by a new-to-market company in Memphis’ history, according to Joann Massey, president and CEO of the Economic Development Growth Engine Board, the area’s local development board.
“It's not only going to bring revenue, jobs, and investment infrastructure to Memphis, but it's going to bring even more opportunity and interest,” Massey told CoStar, earning a 2025 CoStar Impact Award, which recognize exemplary commercial real estate transactions and projects completed in 2025 that significantly influenced neighborhoods.
Where have we heard this before? It’s a tale as old as our country. Communities face giant corporations and their hired guns, toting along paid-off politicians all with the promise of jobs and economic growth.
Is anyone outside of the tech world even asking for AI?
Memphis has a rich cultural history, as the birthplace of rock and roll and home to the blues. Its sweet, tomato-based barbecue sauce was born from the city’s status as a popular port along the Mississippi River. But it has struggled with environmental issues for far too long.
To meet the data center’s incredible energy demands, xAI set up, and is still running, more than 30 unpermitted methane gas turbines, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC).
As the org said in a recent statement, “xAI essentially set up a power plant without any permits, without any oversight, and without any formal input from nearby communities.”
The factory is located in Shelby County, Tennessee, which has the highest rate of children’s asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations in Tennessee. Memphis is also considered one of the 20 “Asthma Capitals” of the United States, according to a 2024 ranking by the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America.
The turbines at the xAI facility pump out smog-forming pollution, nitrogen oxides or NOx, and harmful chemicals like formaldehyde.
The community fails to meet federal standards for smog and received an “F” from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution in 2025. These problems are pronounced in South Memphis, which is made up of predominantly Black communities and is surrounded by industrial polluters, including a steel mill, an oil refinery, a TVA gas plant, and many more.
In Boxtown, the neighborhood closest to the xAI facility, the cancer risk is four times the national average.
“For decades, families living in South Memphis have been overburdened with industrial pollution and environmental injustices,” said SELC Senior Attorney Amanda Garcia in a statement. “Community members we’ve talked with say they worry about being outside for long periods of time because they don’t know what else is in the air,”
Now of course, commonsense pollution controls exist. They would help reduce the turbines’ impact on the air, but again, the SELC says xAI has not been using them.
SELC partnered with the organization SouthWings to do a flyover of the facility in April. The result was aerial photographs that showed 35 gas turbines at the datacenter, nearly double than what was previously known. The number of turbines and extent of their emissions likely make xAI the largest industrial source of the smog-forming pollutant NOx in Memphis.
Shortly after SELC revealed there were 35 gas turbines at the facility, Memphis Mayor Paul Young claimed xAI told him they were only operating 15 of them.
Now, let’s talk about the water.
Data centers need a lot of power, but they also need a ton of water.
The best-case scenario would be to use recycled water from the City of Memphis TE Maxson Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) that’s right next door to the facility.
xAI could be the catalyst for a long-standing campaign to develop a recycled wastewater facility. Learn more about the plans for water reuse plant here. But it’s not without issue. There is known arsenic in the shallow aquifer at the power company coal ash ponds and another source of arsenic in the shallow aquifer right above the Davis Wellfield, according to Protect Our Aquifer, a community organization that works to protect the drinking water source for Memphis.
The more aquifer pumping in the area, according to the org, the higher likelihood that toxic element will be pulled down into the drinking water supply.
And xAI is not alone in these demands for water. Bloomberg News found that about two-thirds of new data centers built or in development since 2022 are in places that are already dealing with water stress.
Google, Tract, Switch, EdgeCore, Novva, Vantage, and PowerHouse are all operating, building, or expanding huge facilities within the Tahoe Reno Industrial Center. Apple is expanding its data center, located just across the Truckee River from the industrial park. OpenAI has said it’s considering building a data center in Nevada as well. Nevada is the country’s driest state.
Additionally, power and water are inextricably linked.
The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) is the nation's largest public power provider, serving more than 10 million people. In 2022, a winter storm impacted the electric grid, causing TVA to implement rolling blackouts and another water crisis with a boil water notice and many residents without water at all. Everyone forgets that power companies rely on drinking water infrastructure to generate power, which causes serious vulnerabilities to the any community.
Can this community thrive with such a huge power and water strain from this facility?
As for jobs and growing the local economy, xAI claimed that 300 jobs would result from its business operations in the city. The Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis notes that data centers offer far fewer employment opportunities than other industrial sectors, largely because they are highly automated.
Either way, that’s not a lot of jobs for an extremely high municipal energy burden.
In April, hundreds of people packed into a South Memphis high school’s auditorium, hoping to speak up.
“I live three miles from the [xAI] facility, and we have enough pollutants in our area to start with before they even started bringing this in and started polluting even more,” Barbara Britton, president of the Boxtown Neighborhood Association said at a rally outside the high school where the hearing took place. “We’re going to fight and we’re going to do everything we can to stop this from polluting in our area.”
While I know we can embrace innovation, I also know we can do it safely. There’s no need for one of the richest men in the world to cut corners. Can’t we have healthy communities and healthy businesses?
Get Involved
Aquifer Action Meeting: Water Reuse + Community Power
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
4:30-6:00pm & 6:00-7:30pm
Whitehaven Public Library
Join Protect Our Aquifer and Young, Gifted & Green for an Aquifer Action Meeting focused on xAI's plan to build a water reuse facility and how we protect Boxtown’s water future.
We’ll dive into why Boxtown’s drinking water infrastructure shouldn’t have to compete with TVA or xAI—and how water reuse can reduce aquifer pumping and help keep our groundwater clean and protected.
Reach out to Memphis City Council representatives and express your concerns or ideas.
Keep the conversation going in the comments below. Are you nervous about a data center coming to a town near you?
I never realized how much water a supercomputer takes. Human needs should come before artificial intelligence's.
Beyond evil and vile to do this for his ridiculous A.I. illegal as hell. But its just now being brought to light. F these evil dastardly killing people at will. They will never care about others, EVER! IMPEACH TRUMP NOW!