How South Memphis Became a Sacrifice Zone for xAI's Data Center
Growth machines, environmental injustice, and AI’s resource demands
In late April 2025, hundreds of Memphis residents packed a high school auditorium to confront local officials over Elon Musk’s xAI data center. Residents from Boxtown—a historically Black, heavily polluted neighborhood—voiced outrage over the company’s unpermitted gas turbines, degraded air quality, and massive water withdrawals from a strained aquifer. Protesters, state representatives, and environmental lawyers denounced the project’s lack of transparency, calling it just the latest exploitative industrial venture imposed on the community without consent. For many, the xAI supercomputer was not a symbol of innovation but a stark reminder of the region’s long-standing environmental racism and structural exploitation.
While local news has reported much of the controversy, this case offers a deeper analytical window into the conflicts and power dynamics that shape the siting of industrial-scale developments. The fact that xAI is tied to Musk—a billionaire (the richest man in the world) and presidential advisor—underscores how these projects operate within not only local struggles but also broader landscapes of national political influence, raising sharp questions about corruption, governance, and accountability.
The “growth machine”—a term that aptly describes machines like xAI’s “Colossus” data center—is also a relevant theory of spatial political economy. In his foundational theory, Harvey Molotch describes the growth machine as powered by coalitions of landowners, developers, political elites, and business actors who mobilize the city as a site for capital accumulation, often sidelining social and environmental costs in favor of valorizing land valorization and attracting investment.1 In Memphis, xAI’s supercharged arrival fuses the power of tech capital with this longstanding urban dynamic. Hailed by the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce as the “Gigafactory of Compute” this investment has intensified the political and economic pressures that subordinate local governance, planning oversight, and community well-being to the imperatives of growth. The siting of the data center in South Memphis—long a racialized sacrifice zone shaped by redlining, disinvestment, and industrial burden—reveals how the Colossus of Musk’s AI empire plugs into these entrenched territorial inequalities, transforming the city’s landscape not as a break from past patterns, but as their digital-era continuation.
From Appliances to Algorithms
To understand how Memphis became a node in Elon Musk’s high-stakes race for artificial intelligence dominance, one must look back to an earlier chapter in the city’s techno-industrial development. In 2011, local and state officials offered at least $188 million in public incentives—$137 million in upfront grants alone—to lure Electrolux, a global appliance giant, to build a factory in South Memphis. Promised as an engine of job creation, the deal lacked enforceable guarantees or refund provisions. When Electrolux abruptly announced in 2019 that it would shutter the plant after just a few years, Memphians were left with little but criticism—not only of fiscal mismanagement but of a deeper, familiar pattern—the speculative logic of the urban growth machine, chasing investment with few community safeguards.
Fast forward to 2024, and South Memphis found itself at the center of a new kind of industrial gamble. Elon Musk’s AI startup, xAI, transformed the long-vacant Electrolux plant into one of the world’s largest supercomputing hubs, named “Colossus” to power its Grok AI chatbot. But unlike the earlier factory project, this deal was struck nearly entirely behind closed doors. The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, Memphis Light, Gas and Water (MLGW), and even local law enforcement entered nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) with xAI, effectively preventing many public officials—including members of the city council—from learning project details until construction was already underway. What had once been framed as an open push for industrial revival became, this time, a covert rush to position Memphis as a digital powerhouse.
Despite this lack of transparency, proponents, including city leaders, hailed xAI as a symbol of Memphis’s reinvention. Mayor Paul Young praised the project as evidence of the city’s “get-it-done” ethos and celebrated its potential to vault Memphis into the global digital economy. Yet beneath the headlines, the numbers told a more sobering story. Unlike traditional manufacturing, the Colossus facility promised few permanent jobs—early reports suggested fewer than 50, reflecting the automation-heavy nature of data center operations. Anticipated infrastructure benefits, including tax revenue and utility upgrades, were vague or deferred, hinging on uncertain future expansions.
More troubling was the sheer scale of the project’s infrastructural and environmental demands. Community advocates like Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP) raised alarms about the vast quantities of electricity and water required to power and cool Colossus, stressing the strain this placed on local grids and aquifers already under pressure. While boosters framed the project as a technological leap, critics saw continuity: yet another megaproject secured through public resources, delivering minimal direct returns to the surrounding community.
Adding to the controversy was Musk’s characteristic use of secrecy. Observers pointed out that the pattern seen in Tesla, SpaceX, and The Boring Company was repeating in Memphis: NDAs and corporate opacity systematically sidelined public input and shielded tax incentives from scrutiny. While agencies like MLGW defended the NDAs as necessary to protect proprietary details, leaked internal records revealed mounting concerns within public agencies about the opaque nature of the arrangements. Yet, what distinguishes the xAI episode from the earlier Electrolux failure is not merely the technology or the investor but the structural dynamics at play. Memphis’s shift from courting appliance manufacturing to AI supercomputing reflects a broader transformation in the political economy of development—from promises of blue-collar job revival to speculative digital futures built on cloud capital.
Racial Composition of South Memphis, TN
Unchecked Expansion and Environmental Fallout
By early 2025, Elon Musk’s xAI officially unveiled the Colossus data center whose resource appetite dwarfed anything the city had seen. The facility initially demanded 150 megawatts of power—more than some small cities—and over a million gallons of water daily from the Memphis Sand Aquifer, a 2,000-year-old underground reservoir that provides drinking water to the region. When the local grid, supplied by MLGW and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), couldn’t meet demand, xAI turned to mobile natural gas turbines typically reserved for post-disaster emergencies. By January, the company’s property arm (a shell company), CTC Property LLC, was retroactively applying for permits to cover the turbines already running and to add 11 more (a total of 15 applied for), even as environmental groups uncovered that many had been operating without air permits, emitting nitrous oxide and formaldehyde at levels up to 50% less efficient than stationary gas plants.
The environmental hazards didn’t end with power demands. xAI expanded to a second Memphis site in Whitehaven, where additional mobile turbines were deployed without formal permitting. The company’s filings revealed formaldehyde emissions just under 10 tons per year—barely skirting the Environmental Protection Agency’s “major source” pollution threshold. The expansion triggered alarm in communities already battling cumulative environmental burdens: a history of contamination from a now-shuttered sterilization plant, the active Valero oil refinery, and a nearby Superfund site. Local activists saw a familiar pattern emerging; as KeShaun Pearson, executive director of Memphis Community Against Pollution, put it to Time, companies “treat southwest Memphis as just a corporate watering hole where they can get water at cheaper price and a place to dump all their residue without any real oversight or governance.”
Memphis’ environmental justice advocates, including the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and Protect Our Aquifer, responded swiftly, warning that xAI’s unchecked operations threatened to deepen longstanding environmental harms. These groups petitioned TVA, MLGW, and city agencies to ensure that South Memphis communities—many already grappling with high rates of cancer, asthma, and poverty—had a voice in decisions that directly affected their health and future. But while the city had just approved a long-term lease of 522 more acres for xAI southwest of the data center, residents were left in the dark about how the land would be used or what further industrial activity it might invite.
This was not the community’s first fight. Just a few years earlier, Boxtown, a predominantly Black neighborhood in South Memphis, became the epicenter of resistance against the proposed Byhalia Pipeline, a crude oil project that would have sliced through their community and crossed the Memphis Sand Aquifer. Framed by its corporate backers as the “path of least resistance,” the pipeline was seen by residents as a clear case of environmental racism—another in a long line of decisions that disproportionately burdened Black communities with the costs of industrial growth. Through fierce grassroots organizing led by MCAP and Protect Our Aquifer, residents ultimately forced the cancellation of the project in 2021, marking a rare victory in a city where corporate interests too often overpower local concerns.
Soon after xAI’s Colossus came online in September 2024, however, that hard-won momentum was being tested. In April 2025, Fairley High School’s auditorium overflowed with residents, activists, and local leaders gathered for a heated public hearing. Holding signs that read “Our Air = Our Lives” and “Our Water, Our Future,” speakers lined up to testify not just against xAI’s emissions but against the accumulated weight of decades of environmental neglect. From Boxtown to Riverside, residents recounted personal histories of respiratory illness, cancer, and contamination, their anger punctuated by chants and jeers that drowned out xAI’s representatives.
At the heart of the outrage was the staggering scale of xAI’s energy and water consumption. By early 2025, the data center had already doubled its GPU capacity, consuming over 1.3 million gallons of water per day, with projections that expansion could push demand to 13.5 million gallons. Although xAI pledged to construct an $80 million greywater recycling facility, the project remains mired in permitting delays, leaving the Memphis Sand Aquifer—a critical and finite resource—as the facility’s primary backup. Residents fear that even temporary overuse would accelerate the aquifer’s depletion and risk long-term contamination.
The company’s energy practices only amplify these fears. Satellite imagery and thermal scans confirms the presence of 33-35 active methane gas turbines—more than double the number listed in xAI’s permit applications. Environmental attorneys accused the company of violating the Clean Air Act, describing the turbines as an unregulated power plant hidden in plain sight. Amanda Garcia, SELC senior attorney, stated, “xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities.” Despite these concerns, the Shelby County Health Department admitted that xAI’s turbine permits were still under review but declined to issue a cease-and-desist order, while xAI insisted the turbines were merely “temporary,” despite filings showing they were designed for round-the-clock operation.
For South Memphis residents, the promises of economic opportunity and tech-sector jobs offered little reassurance. The neighborhood’s air was growing dirtier, its water more vulnerable, and its political institutions less transparent. Community groups like MCAP charged that xAI was exploiting South Memphis as a sacrifice zone—leveraging cheap land, cheap water, and fragmented oversight to accelerate a billion-dollar AI project without public accountability. Their demands were clear—meaningful community participation, rigorous environmental safeguards, and a commitment to put public health over corporate profit. Whether city leaders would listen remains, as ever, uncertain.
Territoriality of xAI’s Data Centers in South Memphis, TN
Techno-Statecraft in the Age of AI
The drama surrounding xAI in Memphis isn’t just about one company or one city—it reveals a deeper shift in how power and infrastructure are being reorganized in the age of AI. Behind the conflicts over turbine emissions and graywater permits lies a broader story of political capture, deregulation, and soft authoritarianism. Colossus, for all its promise amidst the AI hype, sits atop a network of institutional erosion.
This is apparent in the changes within the TVA. Once a cornerstone of New Deal-era planning and public energy provision, TVA has been pulled into the gravitational field of digital capital. Back in November 2024, it approved xAI’s initial request for 150 megawatts of power, even as critics warned the public would shoulder the cost. In early 2025, when xAI was seeking more than was available through the grid—another 260 megawatts for its second facility, the company’s installation of methane-burning turbines effectively created a private, fossil-fueled backup power plant.
Operating without air permits, bypassing public review, and violating federal clean air regulations would normally spark regulatory intervention. But just as scrutiny mounted, the political ground shifted. In early April 2025, the Trump administration abruptly fired two TVA board members, including Chair Joe Ritch, who had voiced concerns about large data center loads and their potential cost to ratepayers. The move left the board without a quorum—effectively freezing any new oversight or policy actions. Meanwhile, Elon Musk, now a Trump political appointee with an expanding portfolio of AI, energy, and defense interests, continued to press for infrastructure expansion, favorable rate structures, and regulatory leeway.
This was no coincidence. The firings stalled a TVA proposal to create a new electricity rate class for data centers—a move that could have curbed subsidies and made companies like xAI pay more for their energy. Instead, with oversight gutted, xAI and its affiliates proceeded with expansion plans, requesting even more power while continuing to operate unpermitted infrastructure. The resulting arrangement is one of informal sovereignty, where public institutions are increasingly subordinated to the imperatives of elite capital.
At the local level, MLGW found itself deeply entwined in this machinery. The utility signed nondisclosure agreements with xAI, approved multi-million-dollar infrastructure upgrades without broad public deliberation, and acknowledged in public statements that xAI would be required to reduce its electricity use during peak demand periods to avoid straining the grid. For residents in Memphis—a city burdened with some of the highest energy costs relative to income in the country—the prospect of seeing public utilities stretched thin to meet the needs of a private supercomputing project feels not just like a policy shortfall, but a profound ethical failure.
Meanwhile, an anonymous group called “Facts Over Fiction” circulated glossy flyers in Boxtown neighborhoods, describing their turbines as “cleaner tech” and “minor” polluters because they used gas rather than diesel or coal, and claiming they were “specially designed to protect the air we all breathe.” Boosters continue to promote Memphis’s emergence as the “next Austin,” while business elites and public officials sidestepping substantive engagement with community demands for transparency, oversight, and reparative investment.
What’s unfolding in Memphis is not a one-off. It is part of a broader political ecology of AI infrastructure—one that channels public resources into private networks, prioritizes computation over care, and leverages institutional disarray to advance elite techno-sovereignty. I’ve covered this pattern in the newly emerging AI Industrial Strategy Under Trump 2.0. It is a reminder that the greenwashed language of innovation can obscure new forms of extraction, and that without intervention, the infrastructures of the future will simply reproduce the inequalities of the past—only faster and at larger scales.
This is not the frictionless future of AI innovation—it is the material face of techno-statecraft, where governments and corporations reshape land, energy, and governance to serve the escalating demands of digital capitalism. What xAI has built in Memphis is not just Colossus the machine, but a political template—a model for how infrastructural expansion bypasses public accountability, redirects collective resources toward private computation, and renders environmental and community well-being expendable in the name of technological progress.
If left unchecked, Memphis will not stand as a local anomaly—it will mark a broader blueprint for how digital capital reorganizes territory, power, and inequality on the ground.
References
Molotch, Harvey L. “The City as a Growth Machine.” The American Journal of Sociology 82, no. 2 (1976): 309–32.