Since Elon Musk announced that he will retreat from his daily work with DOGEPerhaps you are wondering if he has something else to fill this time now that he has closed his operations with the American humanitarian supplier, has destroyed a large part of the country’s scientific research infrastructure and has disrupted the communication systems of the Social Security Administration. One way to discover it would be to ask Grok, his entry into the AI competition. “Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence society, XAI, has made important movements in Memphis,” reports Grok. “But that has aroused controversy.”
Indeed, they have it. Last year, the Musk team obtained an abandoned factory that belonged to Electrolux, the people of the empty cleaner at the limit of the city’s Boxtown district. As Musk explained at the time, “that’s why it is in Memphis, the house of Elvis and also one of the oldest – I think it was the capital of ancient Egypt.” With typical modesty, he renamed his vacuum factory colossus and began to stuff it with NVIDIA graphic processing units, or GPUS, the basic elements of AI systems. For the moment, he has two hundred thousand of these GPUs, and he heads for a million; According to some estimates, it should build the “largest supercomputer” in the world.
All of this treatment takes power to operate, and team XAI therefore moved around thirty-five mobile methane gas generators on the site to support the data center. These are units mounted on trucks, many of which designed by Caterpillar, which give off some of the same infractions of pollutants as other gas combustion devices – including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde – and currently operate without a license. “XAI has essentially built a power plant in the south of Memphis without forgetting, without a license and without regard to families living in neighboring communities,” said Southern Environmental Law Center, in a report published in April. (Complete disclosure: I volunteer each year to judge the Phil Reed de Selc price for the best environmental writing on the South). The SELC called for an “emergency order” of the city to demand that Xai stop using these generators, with a daily fine of twenty-five thousand dollars if the company refuses. The mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, supporter of the project, responded to concerns at a meeting with community members in March. “I want to understand how we can use this project for us,” he said. “I know you all have the impression that we are exploited, but we must speak of a place of force.” After the SELC published its report, Young explained that the company had a request for a permanent permit with the health department of the county of Shelby to direct fifteen generators. “There are thirty-five, but there are only fifteen that are not,” he said. “The others are stored on the site.”
It turns out that Young can be false about this number. Southwings, a group of volunteer pilots who help monitor environmental problems, overflow the site with thermal imagination equipment that showed at least thirty -three generators giving off a lot of heat – indicating that they were drawn and run at the same time. (The Young and Xai office did not respond to the requests for comments.) Taken together, they would produce around four hundred and twenty megawatts of power – the equivalent of the gas power plant in Tennessee Valley Authority nearby.
Memphis housed Elvis – but it was also, of course, where Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to town to support the striking sanitation workers, was assassinated, and there remains a place of strong economic and racial division. This will not surprise anyone to learn that the southern districts of Memphis surrounding Musk’s facilities – including Boxtown and Westwood – are mainly black and also house a number of industrial facilities, including chemical factories and oil refinery. The area already has high pollution levels compared to the more leaves and, according to Politician E & E News, “already leads the state in the visits to emergency services for asthma.” These same districts gathered at the start of the decade to fight, and finally defeat, the Byhalia pipeline in raw oil of forty-nine proposed, which would have crossed the region. In this process, a new political star emerged: Justin Pearson, a young African-American who led who was fighting in the state legislature (from which he was later expelled for having joined an anti-pun-violence demonstration on the parquet floor of the house of Tennessee after a shooting in a Christian school, only to be subjected by the county and reinstated election).
Pearson and his brother Keshaun, the director of a group called Memphis Community Against Pollution, now help lead the fight against Xai. They were eminent voices in a town hall of the health department of the county of Shelby at the end of April, which a local affiliate of the NBC described as “unlike any other town hall of recent memory, with dozens of Shelby Sheriff deputies, Memphis police and troops from Tennessee Highway Patrol standing inside and outside the secondary school Fairley. ” Citizens were allowed to speak two minutes each, but there was no answer to the questions; After two hours, the procedure ended.
A company spokesman was shown at the meeting, but his written statement insisted that “Xal goes beyond the requirements of the required emissions. SMT-130 solar turbines will be equipped with Solonox selective catalytic reduction systems (SCR). The “solar” here, however, has nothing to do with the source of food-this is the name of the Caterpillar turbines division, which stems from the solar aircraft company, founded at the end of the nineteen-twenties, whose name was derived from the fact that it was based under San Diego sunny.)
“I have the impression that my community is disrespectful,” said Justin Pearson (whom I knew during the Byhalia fight) in an email. “I have the impression that my friends, my neighbors and my family members are ignored – both by Xai himself and the leaders of the city defending this data center which emits pollution in our air. Some of these leaders have mentioned the money that Xai will suppose supposedly to Memphis, but what good is money if we do not have to fight with polluted air? While the ancients here say, “all the good is not good money”. “He added:” People are angry and frightened.
If Musk wanted to do it differently, he could have. One report from last year, researchers from several energy and technological companies, clearly indicated that the construction of solar microorineal networks is a quick and very affordable plan to feed these data centers. “Although the construction of out-of-network solar micro-networks of this magnitude is a first, it is very possible to do with the technology that exists today and to evolve it quickly,” revealed the researchers. They actually examined the Musk’s Memphis project and concluded that its use of portable gas generators was at best a punctual solution: “Most users of the electric rental plan for transition once possible because this approach causes very high costs and generally reliability is lower than the permanent infrastructure.”
But the cost is obviously not a big problem for musk. (DOGE claims to have saved one hundred and sixty billion dollars in public spending, but a new analysis of the non-profit partnership for the public service considers that it only did a cost of a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars, because it has worked so quickly and iniguously.) Neither, judging by the two to judge by the two to judge the two Judge by the two to judge by the two to judge by the two to judge by the two to judge by both. DOGEThe performance is to save lives, but it could help do it in Memphis, if he wanted it. Pearson says: “Solar panels and battery storage would be a much more specific alternative to methane gas turbines. Solar panels do not pump pollution or chemicals such as formaldehyde in neighboring communities. ”
More specifically, Musk’s actions in Memphis seem to presuppose that his experience in Washington will prove typical. There, he managed to promulgate his oblique bar damage in a few weeks before leaving the city, although with a note of approval even lower than that of the president. In Tennessee, he falls into seasoned forces of several generations of struggle. During the Byhalia-Pipeline dispute, Pearson recalled: “A representative of the Pipelines company called my community the” track of the slightest resistance “. It seems that societies do not expect us to fight, but we have proven this bad weather on many occasions. ♦
