马斯克xAI孟菲斯数据中心：噪音污染与社区抗议

It get louder. Some nights you can smell the fumes from the turbines and it's really, really noisy at night. You just have to endure this. When South Memphis, Tennessee resident Loretta Thornton first heard about xAI's data centers coming to town, construction was already underway. Now she lives next door to one of the world's largest AI data centers. You just can't get no peace anymore. And that's all I'm doing is enduring it.

And I know I cannot sell my property. Who would want to buy it? Living beside this thing. Elon Musk's xAI, now known as SpaceXAI, following its merger with SpaceX, has made the Memphis area the center of its AI ambitions. It built Colossus 1, just south of Memphis, Tennessee, which was training AI just 123 days after the groundbreaking. And now construction is underway on two other data centers in South Memphis. Originally named Macrohard and Macroharder, now known as Colossus 2.

XAI is also building out energy infrastructure to feed its power hungry supercomputers. It purchased a decommissioned power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, and is now operating dozens of methane gas burning turbines for its main energy source. I'm standing outside xAI's power plant in Southaven, Mississippi. There's quite a few turbines that we can see are actively running, and you can see the heat coming off of them.

It is quite loud. It reminds me of being at an airport. After breakneck speed in construction xAI is now facing multiple lawsuits accusing the company of using loud pollution emitting turbines, some without a permit. These folks are complicit in environmentally unjust projects. So the power plant that they have built without any air permits to power Colossus 2 is unprecedented. I have never seen anything like it. They have been shipping in gas turbines like you would find in a normal power plant.

They now have more than 50 of them, almost 60. The vast majority of them are not operating the same kinds of air pollution control technology that you would have at your typical power plant. The noise is very annoying. It's inescapable. To me, it's just like a form of torture. You just, the noise is always there. Despite the local and national pushback, SpaceX is making serious money from its AI factories. Anthropic is renting compute capacity at Colossus 1 for up to $1.25 billion per month, and Google is renting compute capacity for up to $920 million a month.

AI startup Reflection AI has also inked a deal for Colossus 2 compute for up to $150 million per month. When you think about what precedent Colossus has sent, it hasn't been a great one, but it certainly is a case study for what not to do in most of the rest of the country. But from a capitalist standpoint, they got rewarded for it. People concerned with everything from AI safety to pollution to electricity and water costs are revolting against AI data centers around the U.S.

Our public health is not for sale. Musk's push in Memphis has become a cautionary tale. Memphis is where the resistance was the loudest first. Folks all across the country are learning from what Memphians have continued to do with raising their voices, with organizing, with protesting, and now the entire country is catching on. CNC traveled to Memphis in South Haven to learn why data centers are such a flashpoint, and what hyperscalers can do to win public support as they race to build AI infrastructure nationwide.

SpaceX's AI infrastructure in Memphis truly deserves its name. Colossus. It's a sprawling industrial marvel. Drone footage we captured showed the company's massive data centers with cooling systems, gas power generation, solar farms, and Tesla Megapacks built all around them. Inside, there are hundreds of thousands of Nvidia GPUs. Colossus in that first site was the former Electrolux facility in Boxtown, and that was kind of the main focus from 2024 to 2025.

That's now shifted to Colossus 2 and Macroharder here in Southaven, Mississippi. In two years time, it's kind of a tale of two different hyperscale data centers in two different communities. Neil Strebig is a reporter based in Memphis who has been closely covering the data centers from the ground since they were announced two years ago. To give you an idea, too, of just how much has changed since that June 2024 announcement, xAI and its affiliates have acquired over 1100 acres in Memphis and Southaven areas, and that's about 35% of the total downtown Memphis.

XAI had broken ground on Colossus 1 before the Memphis Chamber of Commerce announced the data centers to the public. Our community was completely blindsided. There was no information given to us ahead of time about what was happening. We used to always have our family reunions here. The most fond memories I have of, you know, hitting basketball shots with my cousins, this area, this is our community. KeShaun Pearson is the director of the Memphis Community Against Pollution and a vocal critic of xAI data centers.

We met him at his friend's barbershop just a few miles from Colossus 1, and he gave us a tour of the area. Since inception, our consistent concern was the scope creep of this project. What we continue to see is that xAI has been spreading like a virus. You see a majority black community, a majority low wealth community being consistently targeted. His neighbors agree. We wish that the city and the Chamber of Commerce would have at least talked to us and let us know what was coming beforehand and gotten our input.

The biggest concern for me is the pollutant, our air quality here. Memphis already has a poor rating and just our overall health, how it's going to be affected, especially as they keep expanding. I put a lot of my money, my retirement money in this house to reframe it because she's beautiful. I loved it before this noise got here, I thought I was in heaven because it was so quiet and all the wild animals. Now it's not like that anymore.

The truth of the matter is, is that data centers can be designed the wrong way, and they can be designed the right way. Jigar Shah is an energy entrepreneur and the former loans director for the U.S. Department of Energy. If you design them the right way, they can reduce electricity rates for everybody. So when you look at Xcel and Allete in Minnesota, they both are hosting a Google data center. And because they were designed the right way, they filed with the Public Service Commission there an estimate that they were going to save $1.7 billion on people's bills because of how the data centers were integrated into the community.

There are other places where the data centers were placed in the middle of the night with no real hearings. Nobody knew they were coming. And there's a lot of folks that are pushing back because they don't think that that's the right way for them to be communicated with. A recent health department hearing turned into a shouting match. An executive from xAI ducking out a side door. The original deals to bring xAI to Memphis happened under subsidiary company names behind closed doors.

But Memphis Mayor Paul Young has been a part of the discussions from the early days. Ever since this project began, we were looking at how to mitigate the potential negative impacts and how to amplify the positives. The first year that the project was online, it provided $25 million in taxes to the city and county, making it the second largest tax paying property in Shelby County, next to FedEx. One of the things that we did was we put together what we call a community benefit ordinance.

This allows us to have the area within a five mile radius of those two facilities, to have 25% of the tax revenue dedicated to those communities. We reached out to the groups involved with bringing xAI to the area, including Memphis Chamber of Commerce, the Memphis City Council, Darren Musselwhite, who is the mayor of Southaven, Mississippi, but they did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Colossus 1 was originally used to train xAI's grok models,

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