These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending.
xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!
80ish% in the US live <100 miles from their hometown.
It would be wise to see "jobs!" Investment!" as little more than a mafioso like threat to agrarian-stay in one place-work to live types. "Sure is a nice Shire you got there. Better hope it doesn't suffer from lack of investment in jobs."
Threats of it all imploding are taken seriously by a lot of people.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/culture/generations/millennials-...
So what if it does? That's normal with the passage of time. As long as human biology exists humans will solve for those problems. Beyond that obligation is just socialized memes, ethno objects that come and go with the generations.
Everyone alive now worried about propagation of our culture sure does not seem concerned Latin fell out of common use. That they aren't spending their lives keeping old traditions alive should make it obvious old traditions don't mean that much to the living.
Politicians and rich need us servicing debt they so graciously took on to invest in jobs or we would be free to police them.
It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.
Also 'historically' is irrelevant. Pollution hurts the people living there now.
Here's an article about what happened literally where I'm sitting: https://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEE...
Stories like this played all all over the US. Read up on Robert Moses for example.
Not that you intended it, but your comment veers close to the sort of "why do black people always talk about racism" thought ending cliche or similar demands to be "colorblind" that ultimately are only functionally used to shut down conversations about extant and continuing racism.
The point is that this type of environmental pollution only is allowed to happen in poor areas that are disproportionately black because of decades of systemic racism like red lining.
If that concept makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing, it should. But you should resist the urge to deny the existence of ideas that are inconvenient
I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a white neighborhood.
The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.
I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment, and "environmental racism" just reeks of the usual agenda pushing.
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/xai-datacen...
by “agenda pushing” do you mean those who have an agenda to have breathable air? because that seems like an entirely reasonable agenda to me.
> The turbines spew nitrogen oxides, also known as NOx, at an estimated rate of 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year — far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or the oil refinery down the road.
> The turbines are only temporary and don’t require federal permits for their emissions of NOx and other hazardous air pollutants like formaldehyde, xAI’s environmental consultant, Shannon Lynn, said during a webinar hosted by the Memphis Chamber of Commerce. The argument appears to rely on a loophole in federal regulations that environmental groups and former EPA officials say shouldn’t apply to the situation.
> Mayo and Lynn didn’t respond to calls and texts from POLITICO’s E&E News requesting comment and have not said publicly how much longer the “temporary” turbines will remain onsite. Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
As you can see, xAI is being deliberately deceptive here and this has been known, but unaddressed for a while now. Remember that we are talking about a grave threat to the health and life of the entire population of a town. That too in a country where healthcare is deliberately unaffordable to ordinary folks. I don't know if you know how nasty formaldehyde and NOx smells.
How do you so casually trivialize and vilify such concerns as 'agenda pushing'? It's very sad that HN has too many apologists for these greedy serial violators and abusers. At the same time, the sheer lack of empathy towards the unprivileged is appalling! They're humans too!
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
My neighbor’s don’t have a right to pollute my property by shining a bright light on it or blowing smoke into it or dumping chemicals into my underground well. Even if it’s mostly legal, it’s still a violation of my underlying right to property
/s because some of you are fucking psychopaths
There's a huge difference between a utility scale power plant (you know, with things like tall chimneys) and "truck mounted" generators in the impact to the local air quality. But you know this and are playing word games.
My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).
Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.
Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.
it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.
What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.
You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.
Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.
https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis
Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.
_Does_ the majority want AI services? I feel like the question “if you could stop AI, would you?” is far too controversial for this to be the case.
My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.
I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.
Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.
On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.
As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.
Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.
Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my home, transport my groceries, and so forth. People have way more energy needs than just the kilocalories that fuel them.
If you're using AI productively, I assume it's already much more energy-efficient than the energy footprint of a human for the same amount of work.
In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the energy required for training the LLM.
LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of general intelligence.
A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human.
It's all about the task, humans are specialized too.
EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to make the gap even bigger.
I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.
But either way, how many human lives are spent making that file?
> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
And then we get this gem...
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.
This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.
This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor industry and AI companies.
I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT guess.
Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate?
Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)
So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546
For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...
1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)
Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...
Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.
The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.
It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.
Like every other industry in the world?
I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.
It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
However, it is worth saying that xAI’s “solution” was illegal, unhealthy for the local constituents, and stinks of corruption, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da....
I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
Why is no one talking about the "other grid" capacity here?
Natural gas at this scale cannot be delivered by truck. It's piped in direct from fields, typically.
When do we run out of natural gas "grid" capacity in these locations? I can't imagine we're that overbuilt compared to the electrical grid itself?
The big freeze in Texas is a recent example of the natural gas grid having localized "brownouts" due to a few factors - one of which being the demand of all the natural gas peakers trying to fire at once.
Seems like this is the next infrastructure piece to have a supply crunch to me? There are places (North Dakota) so contranstrained by capacity to deliver gas to the "grid" that they simply flare it off because it's cheaper to pay the government to do that vs. lay pipe. This implies to me that natural gas is about to become more valuable.
*greed.
We are well past the point that any economic growth at all is anything but a distribution of income problem.
This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to ridiculous levels.
Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of pathological fabulists.
But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers are making a mistake?
> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.
> Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!
The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.
[1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
[2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...
[3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...
I think the first 5 states have this in common: there are lots of coal burning power plants that were shut down, but can be restarted and hooked to the grid on a relatively short notice. The grid is also quite good in this region.
In Texas, it is likely that new power can be generated with a combination of solar, wind, gas, and fast permitting.
I don't have an explanation for Georgia.
For Arizona, and perhaps Nevada and Utah too, I think it is likely to be solar.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2025/12/18/data-center-growth-map-stat...
Illinois gets about half its power from nuclear (we have 6 plants and 11 reactors), followed by natural gas at around 20%, and then about equal amounts of coal and wind, at around 10-15%.
So Illinois is actually a pretty decent place to build datacenters, from a clean power generation perspective.
Wow, "truck-mounted gas turbines"? Who else could have mastered such a futuristic tech in so short a time? Seriously, who wrote this? Grok? And let's ignore that this needless burning of fossil fuel is making life on Earth harder for everyone and everything else.
The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
So they solved the power problem by consuming more fossil fuel. Got it.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-po...
What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”
And yes of course it's a race, everything being equal nobody's going to use your model if someone else has a better model.
The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll eventually level this off though. If performance somehow plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up. That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near future.
wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs" "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it. So if you're not harnessing the sun or wind (forget about the latter in the US right now, btw), you're burning things, and you can get lost with that.
This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We really need to tax billionaires out of existence.
was why not solar ? Yeah Hydrocarbons have no competition if you have to deploy power quickly
1.2GW is a small turbine - compared to the land & battery needed for Solar.
how about Gas ? if you're building in the middle of nowhere ? & there's no gas lines ?
Citation needed.
Assuming a single 1GW the data center runs 24/7 365, it’s consuming 8.76 TwH per year. Only being able to generate $10-$12B in revenue (not profit) per year while consuming as much electricity as the entire state of Hawaii (1.5M people) seems awful.
That said, it is all pretty impressive.
Natural Gas supply problem: worsened
Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened
> Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.
> And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
That said, it obviously sucks that utility prices are rising for people who can not effortlessly cover that (not to speak of the local pollution, if that's an issue). Maybe some special tax to offset that cost to society towards hyper scalers would be a reasonable way to soften the blow, but I have not done the math.
This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.
I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.
https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...
Without agreeing or disagreeing with this idea, I’m left wondering how you’d write such a law.
If company A fires Bob and says “Bob’s job is now done with AI”, that’s a clear case.
What if Bob was on a team of 8 and they just go without backfilling Bob? Maybe AI was the cause; maybe it was the better coffee they got for the office; maybe the workload just shrank a bit; maybe they’re worried about the economic outlook for next year…
Or company A fires Bob and his whole team and outsources to company B. Maybe company B is more efficient at that business process. Maybe they were more efficient before using AI. Maybe they don’t even use AI at all. Maybe they were more efficient before AI but are even more efficient now. In which cases were “jobs replaced by AI”?
Maybe I start a company C and do that business process with 4 people and AI that would take other companies 8-25 people. A brand new company D starts and uses my company C instead of hiring a team to do it or contracting with company B. Were any “human jobs replaced by AI”? Whose job(s)?
Then existing firms will just go bankrupt, and new firms which never had human employees will use AI, and you’ll have the same job losses but no direct replacement and no payment into the UBI fund. Instead, just tax capital gains and retained corporate profits more than currently (taxing the former the same as normal income, with provision for both advance recognition and deferment of windfalls so that irregular capital income doesn't get unfairly taxed compared to recurring income), and fund UBI with a share of that is initially basically the difference between status quo taxes and the new rates. That realigns the incentives, such that an increased share of the economy being capture by capital (a natural consequence of goods and services being produced in a more capital intensive, less labor intensive way) drives more money into the UBI fund, without needing a specific job-level replacement count to drive the funding.
Coal plants are bad.
Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.
Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental problems that AI usage can have by their increased power consumption.
Natural gas engines are efficient!
Ok! But what about the pollution they produce to nearby neighborhoods? What about the health repercussions? Do human lives not matter?
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.
2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!
3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."
4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria
Not so.
LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology humanity has created:
> AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.
