The Shelby County Health Department granted an air permit to Elon Musk's xAI data center, allowing the operation of gas turbines for the Grok chatbot. This decision faced significant community backlash and a potential lawsuit for alleged Clean Air Act violations. xAI's Memphis campus, with its supercomputer Colossus, was established rapidly using mobile gas turbines. Located in a historically industrial Black community, local residents are concerned about harmful emissions from these turbines, especially given the high asthma rates in the area.
"I am horrified but not surprised. The flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act and the disregard for our human right to clean air, by xAI's burning of illegal methane turbines, has been stamped as permissible by the Shelby County Health Department."
"Colossus allowed xAI to quickly catch up to rivals OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in building cutting-edge artificial intelligence. It was built using 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, making it the world's largest supercomputer."
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