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    Why a Memphis Community Is Fighting Elon Musk’s Supercomputer

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    Residents say Mr. Musk’s data center for artificial intelligence is compounding their pollution burden and adding stress on the local electrical grid.Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, is building what he says will be the world’s largest supercomputer. Its electricity needs will rival those of 100,000 homes.The supercomputer’s neighbors in southwest Memphis have a problem with that.The project, part of Mr. Musk’s xAI artificial intelligence business, sits in an old manufacturing plant on more than 550 acres. Before beginning operations there in July, xAI rolled in flatbed trucks loaded with almost 20 mobile power plants, fueled by natural gas, to help meet its electricity demands.Residents of the heavily industrial community — already home to an oil refinery, a steel mill and chemical plants — see no upside. They contend that Mr. Musk’s project has made pollution worse in an area already enveloped in smog.“We’re getting more and more days a year where it is unhealthy for us to go outside,” said KeShaun Pearson, president of Memphis Community Against Pollution and a lifelong resident of the area near the xAI site.The xAI supercomputer center in Memphis is being built at the site of a former appliance factory.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesThe center is to be used to train artificial intelligence models on thousands of powerful computer servers.Whitten Sabbatini for The New York TimesSo far, xAI is using the Memphis facility to develop its artificial intelligence models on a network of thousands of high-powered computer servers. Some of its models are trained on data from Mr. Musk’s social media platform, X.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A.I. Frenzy Complicates Efforts to Keep Power-Hungry Data Sites Green

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      West Texas, from the oil rigs of the Permian Basin to the wind turbines twirling above the High Plains, has long been a magnet for companies seeking fortunes in energy.Now, those arid ranch lands are offering a new moneymaking opportunity: data centers.Lancium, an energy and data center management firm setting up shop in Fort Stockton and Abilene, is one of many companies around the country betting that building data centers close to generating sites will allow them to tap into underused clean power.“It’s a land grab,” said Lancium’s president, Ali Fenn.In the past, companies built data centers close to internet users, to better meet consumer requests, like streaming a show on Netflix or playing a video game hosted in the cloud. But the growth of artificial intelligence requires huge data centers to train the evolving large-language models, making proximity to users less necessary.But as more of these sites start to pop up across the United States, there are new questions on whether they can meet the demand while still operating sustainably. The carbon footprint from the construction of the centers and the racks of expensive computer equipment is substantial in itself, and their power needs have grown considerably.Just a decade ago, data centers drew 10 megawatts of power, but 100 megawatts is common today. The Uptime Institute, an industry advisory group, has identified 10 supersize cloud computing campuses across North America with an average size of 621 megawatts.This growth in electricity demand comes as manufacturing in the United States is the highest in the past half-century, and the power grid is becoming increasingly strained.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More