The real cost of slightly funnier AI is the health of a poor black community

Irish Examiner

13-05-2025

It's not a place that comes up much in Irish discussions of AI but it doesn't take much Googling to see that South Memphis is used to being on the wrong end of other people's ambitions.
The neighbourhood of Boxtown, hemmed in by railyards, petrochemical works and interstate flyovers, has long shouldered the particulate fallout of industry so that the rest of the United States can breathe a little cleaner.
This spring, however, residents learned that the newest neighbour on the block is not another refinery but xAI, Elon Musk's artificial intelligence start-up. As Ariel Wittenberg reports in an excellent piece of journalism, Musk's company has already installed 35 methane-fuelled gas turbines, doing so without first obtaining the air quality permits that every other industrial operator must secure.
At full tilt, the turbines belch out an estimated 2,000 tonnes of nitrogen oxide (NOx) a year, a pollution load larger than that of the city's incumbent gas plant. This is all to keep the cooling fans spinning inside a gargantuan data centre Musk has dubbed 'Colossus'.
And what is Colossus' job? Training Grok, a chatbot whose main selling point is that, unlike ChatGPT, it "answers with attitude".
The turbines sit on trailers in neat military rows, but their emissions are anything but mobile. Lawyers at the Southern Environmental Law Centre argue that once a generator stays in one place for more than a year the US Clean Air Act treats it as a stationary source, obliging the owner to install best available pollution controls and apply for a major source permit.
xAI insists the machines are "temporary" and has applied belatedly for permission to operate just 15 of them, an interpretation that one might describe as creatively optimistic.
None of this nuance comforts South Memphis residents who already experience rates of asthma and cardiopulmonary disease far above the national average.
Environmental Racism
Boxtown's history is intertwined with the afterlife of slavery. Freed Black Memphians built the settlement from discarded rail freight crates — hence the name — and have fought environmental encroachment ever since. When Tennessee pushed Interstate 55 through the district in the 1960s, respiratory illness spiked.
Oil tank farms followed. Now, xAI's turbines threaten to add an invisible, odourless layer of NOx that reacts with sunlight to produce ozone and fine particulates, aggravating asthma in children and driving up cardiovascular mortality.
The pattern is depressingly familiar: lucrative 'innovation' projects enjoy political cover precisely because they locate in communities with the least leverage to fight back. Musk's boosters point to future "tech jobs"; locals counter that no one sick at home on a nebuliser benefits much from coding bootcamps.
This is a textbook case of environmental racism: the disproportionate siting of polluting infrastructure in communities of colour, often justified by promises of progress that rarely materialise locally. Boxtown's residents are not passive victims of circumstance, they are the inheritors of generations of resistance, but the systemic forces arrayed against them are profound.
From exclusionary zoning laws to the deliberate under-enforcement of environmental regulations, Black and marginalised communities across the United States have been made to bear the hidden costs of industrial expansion—and here in Ireland we unwittingly add to it with every interaction with a chatbot.
As US civil rights groups have long argued, environmental racism is not merely about pollution, it's about power: who has the ability to say no, and who does not.
In wealthier, whiter suburbs, a proposal to run 35 gas turbines without permits would trigger a media outcry and a flurry of legal injunctions. In Boxtown, the project was halfway done before most residents even knew it was happening.
This disparity is not accidental. It is the result of a US environmental regulatory system that too often bends toward capital, not community. Agencies defer to corporate timelines, not public health data. Permitting thresholds are written without regard for cumulative burden.
And in the media, the voices of those on the frontlines are drowned out by tech-world narratives of disruption and inevitability.
Environmental racism flourishes in the shadows of complexity—when pollution is invisible, when law is opaque, and when harms are distributed over decades. Yet its effects are measurable in hospital admissions, school absenteeism, and premature deaths.
If AI is to claim any mantle of moral progress, it cannot be built atop the same extractive foundations that defined the fossil-fuel age. In Boxtown, all our future is being beta-tested. The question is: for whose benefit, and at whose expense?
What looks weightless on a smartphone screen on Barrack Street rests on an industrial backend of steel, silicon, water and energy in Boxtown. Training a large language model the size of Grok can consume tens of gigawatt hours of electricity, the annual output of a small power station.
Unless that electricity is genuinely carbon-free (and available at the right time of day), data centre operators resort to onsite gas generation to guarantee the 24/7 flows modern AI demands.
Across the world, including here in Ireland, AI is accelerating a re-fossilisation of the grid. Companies claim the arrangement is "temporary" until renewables catch up, but communities breathing the fumes know that temporary structures have a habit of outstaying their welcome.
That the systems meant to prevent exactly this scenario failed in the US should be a warning to everyone. Environmental regulation presumes slow cooking industrial development, not the venture capital-fuelled sprint characteristic of AI.
By the time officials grasp what companies like xAI are building, the turbines are often already roaring.
In the US, the Clean Air Act's threshold for 'major source' status — 100 tonnes per year of NOx — was drafted in 1977, when nobody imagined a single computer project needing 400 MW of gas generation. Colossus shows that server racks are the new smokestacks, and the law remains rooted in a bygone industrial age.
Elon Musk styles himself a techno-humanist. Yet the benefits of Grok — marginally funnier answers to X reposts—accrue to a global online public, while the damage concentrates in the lungs of South Memphis children. That asymmetry should ring alarm bells for anyone who believes innovation must account for its externalities.
We are literally poisoning the air of a Black community for the sake of a chatbot.
No amount of future possibility should excuse dirty shortcuts in the present. If Silicon Valley insists on "moving fast and breaking things", it must be reminded that people are not things, and their lungs are not expendable.
James O'Sullivan lectures in digital humanities at University College Cork