Elon Musk's Supercomputer in Memphis Worries Locals

NPR looks at how the energy-hungry plant caught even government officials by surprise
By Gina Carey,  Newser Staff
Posted Sep 22, 2024 4:10 PM CDT
Elon Musk's Supercomputer in Memphis Worries Locals
Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk speaks at the SATELLITE Conference and Exhibition in Washington.   (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

Stored in a building the size of 13 football fields, a supercomputer built to propel Elon Musk's artificial-intelligence enterprise dubbed xAI has flipped the "on" switch in South Memphis, Tennessee. But residents, environmental agencies, and some City Council members say they didn't know it was coming. "We have been deemed by xAI not even valuable enough to have a conversation with," KeShaun Pearson, president of the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, tells NPR. Memphis Councilwoman Yolanda Cooper-Sutton says she found out about the plant watching the news. It seems that the mayor, the local chamber of commerce, and reps from local utilities (who Forbes previously reported had to sign NDAs) were among the small team involved in bringing in the company. NPR takes a look:

  • Meet Colossus: Musk is building what he says will be the world's biggest supercomputer, which he said on X was brought online over Labor Day weekend after just 122 days and has the capacity to double in power in months. Dubbed Colossus, it's housed in a 785,000 square-foot factory sitting on 217 acres of land that can potentially expand another 580 acres. As Ted Townsend, the CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber," puts it: "If you take the two largest supercomputers in the world and you combine them, and you multiply that by four— that's what we're building here in Memphis."
  • Energy impact: AI guzzles up a surprising amount of energy (Scientific American estimates data centers comprise 1-1.5% of global electricity consumption). But even by AI standards, shooting for the biggest of them all requires an enormous amount of juice to function—150 megawatts of electricity, which NPR notes is what it takes to power 100,000 homes in a year.
  • Community worries: No studies have been done to examine Colossus' impact on local communities, which have endured pollution from a number of nearby facilities including a steel mill, oil refinery, power plant, wastewater facility, and a decommissioned coal plant. The area's industrial zone has been linked to higher cancer and asthma rates, as well as South Memphis' 10-year decrease in life expectancy compared to other parts of the city. The EPA says it's "looking into the matter" of potential air pollution from the new plant's turbines.
(Read the full story.)

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