Health officials in Memphis, Tennessee, are being urged to investigate turbines at xAI’s data center over claims that the devices installed by Elon Musk’s company could leave residents breathing poorer quality air.
Campaign group the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) has written to the Shelby County Health Department stating that it believes 18 generators on the site, in the Boxtown area of South Memphis, require permits.
xAI’s Memphis ‘smog’
xAI’s data center is housed in a 750,000 sq ft (69,677 sqm) former Electrolux plant, which closed in 2022.
Musk has dubbed the site ‘the gigafactory of compute,’ and says it will eventually be home to up to 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs for training and running the next generation of xAI’s large language model, Grok, with a second cluster of 300,000 B100 GPUs scheduled to come online next year.
However, getting sufficient power to the site for such a powerful set-up requires significant investment. While xAI has pledged to spend $24 million building a substation that would give it access to up to 150MW (if approved by the state grid operator), the site currently only has 7MW available from the grid.
To solve this problem, Musk has drafted in 14 mobile natural gas generators from Voltagrid, each capable of supplying 2.5MW. The SELC letter says that four 16MW SMT-130 turbines from a company called Solar Turbines have also been brought to the site, adding to the problem of poor air quality in Shelby County.
The letter says that ground-level ozone, or smog, in the region has exceeded the recommended level for the last three years, and is set to do so again in 2024.
“Memphis residents currently breathe unhealthy air, and the problem is worsening,” the letter said. “Exposure to ozone pollution aggravates lung diseases such as asthma, emphysema, and chronic bronchitis and increases the frequency of asthma attacks. Children are the most vulnerable to the harmful effects of ozone pollution.”
The xAI generators “have the capacity to emit about 130 tons of the ozone-precursor nitrogen oxides (NOx) per year, ranking the turbines as the 9th largest source of NOx in Shelby County,” the letter added.
SELC, which said it was writing on behalf of several Memphis community groups, added that “it appears that, at minimum, the four 16MW turbines absolutely require an air permit prior to installation and operation even if they are temporary, and we suspect the smaller turbines also trigger permitting requirements.
“We therefore call on Shelby County Health Department to verify that xAI is operating these turbines without the required air permit and bring an appropriate enforcement action for failing to obtain a permit.”
Elon versus Memphis: the saga continues
It is not the first time SELC has raised opposition to the xAI data center. In July, it warned of “harmful consequences” to residents as a result of the data center development due to the strain it is likely to put on the Memphis power grid.
“The xAI facility is demanding a jaw-dropping 150MW of firm power by the end of 2024. To put that demand in perspective, 150MW is enough electricity to power 100,000 homes,” it said in a letter to grid operator Tennessee Valley Authority requesting a review of the data center’s power arrangements
Overcommitting to industrial load “could have serious and even life-threatening consequences for residential customers in Memphis, contrary to the purpose of the TVA Act and the board policy,” the letter said. “When TVA cannot meet peak demand, families go without power during increasingly severe hot and cold weather.”
Musk’s company has also aggravated local councilors, who said they had been left in the dark about the plan for the data center, only learning about it via media reports.
