Resident Says She Can’t Open Windows Anymore Because of ‘Rotten’ Smell from Living Near Elon Musk’s Giant Data Center

Kenny Holston-Pool/Getty; Brandon Dill for The Washington Post via Getty

“It’s God’s given air, and man shouldn’t take it away from us,” said Boxtown resident Easter Knox

Sam Gillette

Some Memphis residents say they’re already grappling for clean air after Elon Musk’s AI company began pumping out plumes of pollution to power its gargantuan data center.

“It’s God’s given air, and man shouldn’t take it away from us,” Easter Knox, a 76-year-old woman who lives in Boxtown, just three miles from the xAI data center, told Time earlier this year. “I don’t care how much money you got.”

The woman — who was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in 2024 and has lost three loved ones to cancer — began to smell gas in the air last year and no longer opens her windows because of the “rotten cabbage” odor.

Boxtown has a majority Black population with a median household income of $36,000, Time and Politico previously reported. For generations, residents have battled pollution-related health issues.

The area includes 17 industrial facilities and the air quality was deemed unhealthy due to smog even before the construction of the billionaire’s supercomputer, according to Politico. The emergence of the data facility has only exacerbated the residents’ predicament.

“Imagine the outcry if these facilities had been placed next to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, no one would allow it,” Austin Dalgo, an academic primary care physician in South Memphis, told TIME. “Instead, they were placed in the backyard of a historically Black, underserved neighborhood, reinforcing a long legacy of environmental racism in Memphis—and our country.”

Musk and xAI did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s requests for comment.

On xAI’s website, the company describes their supercomputer, dubbed Colossus, as the “world’s biggest.” The AI training system, with a staggering output of 200k GPUs (Graphics Processing Unit), helps power the company’s chatbot, Grok, according to the website.

“We were told it would take 24 months to build,” read a message on the website. “So we took the project into our own hands, questioned everything, removed whatever was unnecessary, and accomplished our goal in four months.”

In order to power the massive machine, the company has used gas turbines, according to the reports.

The turbines were meant to be a temporary solution as proper infrastructure was built to support Colossus, but residents said they fear the dangerous precedent such moves are setting for other AI data centers, the Memphis Commercial Appeal reported.

In June, the NAACP filed an intent-to-sue notice to xAI, claiming that the company was violating the Clean Air Act, though a lawsuit has not yet been filed, according to the outlet.

None of those turbines had pollution controls that are normally mandated by federal law or a permit until this summer, Politico previously reported, noting that by that time, they’d already been in operation for six months.

Following months of debate, the Shelby County Health Department approved a permit in July.

In a statement shared with the Memphis Commercial Appeal in July, xAI said it followed all federal, state and local laws. The company said that all temporary turbines were decommissioned, with only 15 permitted turbines in use, according to the report. (The company is also constructing a second Colossus campus at 5420 Tulane Road, with plans of building an even larger data center in nearby Whitehaven, the outlets reported.)

On Monday, Dec. 15, an appeal to revoke xAI’s air permit was dismissed following a seven-hour hearing involving community members, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal.

A central point in the appeal was that the original ruling was “unlawful” and that the current situation allows companies to put up gas turbines without permits, the local community’s input or preliminary environmental reports, according to the outlet.

AUSTIN JOHNSON/AFP via Getty

As various organizations, advocates and watchdog groups sound the alarm, city officials have argued that the company’s presence in the area will support the local economy through new jobs and property tax revenue that will go towards public projects, according to Time.

That hasn’t swayed some residents’ concerns. In April, hundreds of people turned up at a public hearing regarding xAI’s air permit for permanent turbines and shared their fears.

“Why can’t we breathe at home?” said 28-year-old Alexis Humphrey, who had her first major asthma attack in 15 years not long after the supercomputer was built, according to Time.

 

After the Trump administration shut down the Environmental Protection Agency’s scientific research arm, concern has grown as data centers owned by major companies have raced to expand. Residents have raised fears about increased electricity costs, while people in other states have worried about the quality of their drinking water.

As the worry about the long-term health effects of the nearby data center grows in South Memphis, more people are speaking out.

At a protest earlier this year, according to Politico, state representative Justin Pearson said, “They put our lungs and our air on the auction block and sold us to the richest man in the world.”

https://news.yahoo.com/news/articles/resident-says-she-cant-open-201553033.html

 

About Post Author