What AI is doing to Memphis, and what that means for all of us.
It’s a story as old as asphalt. A low-income, majority Black city gets hollowed out by disinvestment. The jobs vanish. The schools crumble. The land sits quiet and poisoned. Then a billionaire shows up with a press release and a promise. City leaders call it hope. The people call it what it is. Exploitation dressed up as progress.
This time the billionaire is Elon Musk. The vehicle is artificial intelligence (AI). The city is Memphis.
And once again the people who live closest to the smokestacks, the turbines, and the toxins are the same ones always asked to pay the price. Marginalized communities are being hunted for land, for silence, for sacrifice. It ends like it always ends. Pollution gets worse. Illness spreads. Public trust collapses. The profits are short term. The damage is generational.
They called it a dream deal
Mayor Paul Young stood in front of cameras and called it the biggest investment Memphis had seen in decades. A twelve billion dollar private project. No tax abatements. Hundreds of jobs. A catalyst for a city still trying to crawl out of systemic neglect.
But nobody said who the deal was with until after the paperwork was signed and the machines were already humming. It was Musk. And his company xAI.
What they did not say was that Musk was building the largest supercomputer in the world. What they left out was that it would sit on top of a polluted, abandoned industrial site in South Memphis. What they ignored was that the neighborhood surrounding it is already full of families fighting asthma, cancer, and poverty.
The company brought in at least 35 methane gas turbines without telling the public. They only asked for permits for 15. Thermal imaging taken by the Southern Environmental Law Center showed all of them running.
This was not an accident. This was the plan.
This is not a job creator. This is a machine that feeds itself
The supercomputer is named Colossus. It powers Musk’s chatbot, Grok. And it needs enormous amounts of electricity to run. So much that the city’s utility grid cannot keep up.
During a livestream in February, Musk said they had to haul in trailer after trailer of diesel generators just to keep Colossus online. He also announced a second data center coming soon. Colossus 2. He says it will require one full gigawatt of power. That is almost one third of what the entire Memphis metro area uses on its hottest summer days.
And the city is already stretched thin.
People who live nearby were never asked. They were never consulted. But they are the ones now breathing in the byproducts. And when they stood up to ask questions at a public hearing, they were met with guards, deputies, and silence from the company.
At that hearing, the man representing xAI read a short statement. He was shouted down. He walked out. That was his third and final public appearance.
Musk has never shown his face.
This is environmental racism
AI supercenters are energy vampires. They consume electricity on a massive scale. They rely on backup gas turbines, diesel generators, and water-intensive cooling systems. They flood neighborhoods with noise and heat and emissions.
And they are being dropped into Black and brown communities on purpose.
Not by mistake. Not because of coincidence. But because this is the blueprint.
Build where the land is cheap and the pushback is weak. Build where the people have been ignored long enough to be considered expendable.
The data centers powering the AI boom are almost never built in white suburbs. They are built in places like South Memphis. Like Loudoun County in Virginia. Like Roxbury. Like East San Jose.
These are communities already dealing with the fallout of environmental racism. Already living with toxic waste, highway pollution, and asthma rates through the roof. Now they are being told to welcome another layer of destruction in the name of progress.
You cannot talk about AI without talking about whose air is being poisoned to keep it running.
The people are angry. They should be
At that hearing in April, the room was packed. Residents told stories about cancer in their families, about struggling to breathe, about raising kids in a city that has sold off its future for empty corporate promises before.
They have seen this before. Electrolux took millions in public subsidies then left town. FedEx promised opportunity but parked it in the hands of a few. This time it is different only in the scale.
xAI wants to turn Memphis into the Digital Delta. But the same people who were left out of the last economic wave are being buried by this one.
Mayor Young says the company is paying taxes. He says they are building an eighty million dollar water facility. He says we need the money.
But the people need clean air. They need trust. They need to know that development will not come with tumors and nosebleeds and spiking asthma cases.
They are not getting that.
This is not innovation. This is violence with branding
What AI companies are doing is not neutral. It is not futuristic. It is not clean. It is extractive. It is harmful. And it is racist.
Environmental racism means building a supercomputer in a neighborhood that already has unsafe water. It means burning gas turbines next to a school. It means sending fliers with fake data to poor families and expecting them to believe it.
AI is being built on the backs of the same people who have always paid for someone else’s future. And once again those people are Black, brown, poor, and politically invisible.
If you are not paying attention now, you will be soon. Because this playbook is spreading. If you have a power grid, a cheap zip code, and a community with little leverage, they are coming for you too.
We are not data farms. We are not sacrifice zones. We are not your fuel
Until tech giants and their political mouthpieces come with a plan that protects the health and humanity of every community they build in, we say no. Until there is actual consent, oversight, and accountability, we say no.
AI is not worth it if it destroys the very people it claims to uplift.
This is not the future. This is another chapter in a very old story.
But this time, we are telling it ourselves.
Why pushing back on the AI narrative matters
For those who shrug and say AI is here to stay, or that individual choices don’t matter because corporations are the biggest users, you’re missing the point. Our choices matter. Choosing to limit our use of AI tools, questioning how they’re built and who they serve, and speaking out against the harm they cause are all part of the public pressure that shapes what comes next. Public policy doesn’t just appear out of thin air. It gets built from the ground up through civic action, collective voice, and individual decisions that add up. Saying there’s no point in resisting AI or that only regulation will fix it is surrender. That’s not how change happens.
There is also a dangerously common misconception circulating in public discourse that individual resistance to AI is futile simply because the scale of corporate adoption dwarfs any single user’s impact. But this view reflects a shallow understanding of how public policy is actually shaped. Policy change does not begin in legislative chambers or corporate boardrooms. It begins with people refusing to normalize harm. It is driven by friction, by discourse, by political noise that forces institutions to respond. The civil rights movement, environmental protections, labor laws—all of these were built from years of sustained public pressure, often in the face of claims that the system was too entrenched to change. To dismiss individual responsibility in the age of AI is to ignore the foundational role that public sentiment plays in shaping the regulatory environment.
This moment requires more than technical regulation drafted in silence behind closed doors. It requires a politicized, mobilized public that understands how AI is already shaping energy systems, environmental outcomes, labor markets, and racialized geographies. It requires people willing to reject the framing of inevitability. Choosing to disengage from AI tools that rely on destructive infrastructure is not performative. It is an act of civic participation.
Raising our voices in opposition, especially when these systems target frontline communities, is a necessary precondition for democratic oversight. Waiting passively for regulators to act assumes that technocrats and lawmakers will respond without pressure. That is not how policy works. Environmental justice, especially when entangled with emerging technologies, has never been protected without sustained public action. Refusing to normalize AI’s extractive footprint, especially when it is built on the backs of Black and brown communities, is not only moral. It is strategic.
We do not need to wait for the perfect law or the next election cycle to begin shaping the future. We shape it now, through the choices we make, the tools we reject, and the institutions we hold to account. If we fail to do so, we are not just bystanders. We are collaborators in the harm.
Policy follows culture, and culture shifts when people speak, organize, and refuse to normalize harm. We cannot let defeatism become the default. If we don’t shape the conversation, corporations and their lobbyists will do it for us, and they already are.
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