Elon Musk is at the forefront of the rush to expand AI (artificial intelligence) capabilities. He built a huge data center in Memphis, Tennessee, to power the technology. Now residents are complaining about a ‘rotten’ smell in the area. Keep reading for more information on the building that has a neighborhood divided.
xAI Center Goes Up In Record Time
Elon Musk is back to business as usual. He had a brief stint in the Trump administration. The Tesla founder left his role as head of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in May 2025. The tech entrepreneur resumed his quest to advance technology, including the development of AI.
He introduced the AI assistant, Grok, to X (formerly known as Twitter) in 2024. While AI is prevalent in the world today, it’s still learning tasks and languages. In early 2024, he built a supercomputer center in Memphis, Tennessee, to power AI development. The facility was scheduled to be built in a year, but Elon Musk had it done in 122 days.
Nicknamed “Colossus,” the facility is at the center of a fight between local residents and officials who believe xAI is essential to the city’s economy.
Residents Complain Of ‘Rotten’ Smell From Elon Musk Data Center
A permit to revoke xAI’s air permit was denied by the Air Pollution Control Board on Monday, December 15. According to the local paper, the original appeal claimed the air permit was “unlawful.” But the Air Pollution Control Board thought otherwise.
Residents of Boxtown, located just three miles away from the supercomputer, have been complaining for at least a year about the xAI facility. One resident told Time magazine about a “rotten” smell coming from the facility.
“It’s God’s given air, and man shouldn’t take it away from us,” Easter Knox 76, told the outlet about the supercomputer center. The Boxtown resident was diagnosed with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease in 2024, the same year xAI went up.
She said that she began to smell gas in the air after the facility was built with multiple gas turbines to keep it running. Now, she claims she can’t open her windows because of the smell of “rotten cabbage.”
Another resident claimed that they had a severe asthma attack just days after the Grok chatbot went live on X. Time magazine conducted a study of the area’s air pollution before and after xAI was built. The study found that “peak nitrogen dioxide concentration levels have increased by 79% from pre-xAI levels in areas immediately surrounding the data center, and by 9% in nearby Boxtown.”
“Imagine the outcry if these facilities had been placed next to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, no one would allow it,” Austin Dalgo, a physician in South Memphis, told Time.
However, with the latest appeal dismissed, there’s not much residents can do to prevent Elon Musk’s AI data center from allegedly polluting the environment.
Jennifer Havener grew up in a small town in Upstate New York. She earned her B.A in Writing & Literature from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. She always knew watching reality TV shows and soap operas, particularly ‘Days of Our Lives’, would come in handy someday. When she’s not writing, she’s playing with her dogs, Lola and Ruger