I think I first heard about xAI’s plans in Memphis from Stephen Hackett’s blog. He collected a few posts about the upcoming project back in June:
The Daily Memphian reports that the deal came together very quickly, and that the location is an old Electrolux oven factory, which has been undergoing mysterious renovations for several weeks. The area where the factory is located is home to other industries, and seems well-equipped for the task.
It sounds like there were good reasons for choosing Memphis. Elon Musk’s companies are scattered… San Francisco, Austin, somewhere in Nevada, the bottom tip of Texas. Those all seem reasonable locations for each office or factory.
Today I caught up reading about how it has been going since then in Memphis, now that the AI cluster is up and running with 100,000 Nvidia H100s. The scale is sort of hard to imagine for those of who run only a handful of servers.
From an article in Fortune:
One main concern is the strain it will create on the city’s resources. Officials of municipal utility MLGW estimate that Colossus requires up to 1 million gallons of water per day to cool the servers and will consume as much as 150 megawatts of power.
Unfortunately in Elon’s rush to get the next version of Grok trained, there have been shortcuts taken to get that much power online. Newsweek reports:
To get that kind of power, the facility will first need a new electricity substation and improvements to a transmission line. Musk didn’t want to wait for that, so he found a workaround to power his AI center in the meantime. Industry observers who tracked the Memphis facility’s progress via satellite found that the aerial images show a fleet of tractor trailer-sized electric generators parked along the facility’s perimeter. The generators burn natural gas to produce electricity on-site.
Apparently there were no permits to install those generators. From CNBC:
The Southern Environmental Law Center sent a letter this week to the Health Department in Shelby County, where Memphis is located, and to a regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency on behalf of several local groups, asking regulators to investigate xAI for its unpermitted use of the turbines and the pollution they create.
These kind of compromises reflect poorly on a leader who is committed to renewal energy and electric cars. AI is a fundamental shift in computing, it’s not going away, and when used properly I believe it can be a force for good. But there is already so much pushback against AI — and we have enough challenges with climate change already — that the opening of a data center like this needs to be better executed. A more well-considered use of clean energy and water. The implementation matters.
