In Southwest Memphis, residents of a historically Black neighborhood now live in the shadow of one of the largest computers ever built. Elon Musk's xAI has erected a sprawling supercomputing campus there — anchored by data centers it calls "Colossus" and "Colossus II" — and the community's response has been anything but grateful. People who have spent generations fighting to keep their air clean and their bills affordable see a familiar pattern: an industrial behemoth dropped in their midst, that the project’s environmental and power costs will ultimately be borne by their community.
That scene would have been unthinkable a few years ago, when data centers were a political winner. Low-profile infrastructure projects that promised jobs, tax base growth, and a sheen of technological progress, they went up quietly on the edge of town, drew little public attention, and gave elected officials of both parties something easy to point to as an economic development win.
That era is over.
The explosive growth of artificial intelligence has transformed data centers from invisible infrastructure into one of the most combustible issues in politics. Today's facilities are massive industrial operations that can consume as much electricity as a small city. And they are clustering most aggressively across the South and Sun Belt — Virginia, Texas, Georgia — where land is plentiful, regulation is lighter, and demand for power is surging.
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