Category: Xai in Memphis

CNBC is breaking the prospectus down, but a few things jumped out at me right away.

First, this bit from Lora Kolodny:

The company breaks down its business into three units: Space, Connectivity and AI. Connectivity includes the Starlink satellite internet service, which is sold directly to consumers, as well as to government and military agencies.

According to the filing, Starlink generated $3.26 billion in revenue in the latest quarter, accounting for 69% of the total. The company now boasts about 10.3 million Starlink subscribers.

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Joe Wilkins, writing at Futurism:

In the AI world, there are what the tech scholar Kate Crawford has called the “Great Houses of AI.” These are Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta — giant tech monopolies which happen to also be four of the six top US corporations by market value.

Then there are the lesser houses, the lower fiefdoms squabbling over the crumbs that fall from the big kids’ table. This is where we find Elon Musk’s xAI. Though the world’s richest man has pumped billions of dollars into his pet AI project, it seems all the money in the world can’t buy customers — or even respect, for that matter.

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Tim De Chant, TechCrunch:

Elon Musk’s xAI is running nearly 50 natural gas turbines at its Mississippi data center, power plants that the state is currently not regulating thanks to a loophole.

The power plants are considered “mobile” by the state of Mississippi because they are sitting on flatbed trailers, thus allowing them to dodge to air pollution regulations for one year. The NAACP, which has filed a lawsuit on behalf of residents in the area, says the unchecked emissions from the turbines is worsening air quality in an already polluted region. This week, it asked the court for an injunction against xAI.

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Some afternoon news from an unsigned xAI press release:

SpaceXAI has signed an agreement with Anthropic to provide access to Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers.

Built from the ground up in record time, Colossus delivers unprecedented scale for AI training, fine-tuning, inference, and high-performance computing workloads. Colossus 1 features over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs, including dense deployments of H100, H200, and next-generation GB200 accelerators. The cluster delivers extreme parallel performance for large language models, multimodal systems, scientific simulations, and generative AI at frontier scale.

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xAI, on X:

xAI is committed to building a state-of-the-art water recycling plant in Memphis. This plant will protect billions of gallons of water each year.

The team is currently prioritizing other more immediate projects at the site but our plans to build the water plant have not changed.

I certainly hope so.

Folks in Memphis responded strongly to yesterday’s news that the water treatment plant was on hold. xAI has very little credibility in the eyes of a lot of Memphians. The company not explaining what “other more immediate projects” have taken priority hasn’t helped.

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Part of xAI’s deal with the city of Memphis included an $80 million greywater facility designed to reduce the amount of water the company needs for cooling its data centers. The Mid-South sits atop the Memphis Sand Aquifer that provides us with some of the very best water in the country. It is our best natural resource by far, and one that many people have worked hard to protect.

Ground was broken on the plant in October, but as of today, work has stopped. Samuel Hardiman at The Daily Memphian broke the news:

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Faiz Siddiqui, writing at what’s left of The Washington Post ( Apple News) about the continuing fallout of xAI’s CSAM scandal:

“When a mother from eastern Tennessee asked local police how someone had created naked photos of her teenage daughter, she recalls being told it was a company she’d never heard of: xAI, the artificial intelligence start-up run by Tesla CEO Elon Musk.

Police alleged a person arrested in December had used Grok, xAI’s chatbot, to edit photos, including one from the teen girl’s Instagram account, removing a blue bikini from one image to “depict her without any clothes,” according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

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Yesterday, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality Permit Board (MDEQ) unanimously granted xAI a permit for an expanded power plant in Southaven, Mississippi. The plant will be powered by 41 natural gas turbines.

Some of those turbines are already in place, with questions surrounding their legality now finalized.

The way in which MDEQ went about this process has left many local — and national — critics of xAI unhappy, as Kailynn Johnson writes for The Memphis Flyer:

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Ashley Belanger, writing at Ars:

For miles around xAI’s makeshift power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, neighbors have endured months of constant roaring, erupting pops, and bursts of high-pitched whining from 27 temporary gas turbines installed without consulting the community.

In a report on Thursday, NBC News interviewed residents fighting to shut down xAI’s turbines. They confirmed that xAI operates the turbines day and night, allegedly tormenting residents in order to power xAI founder Elon Musk’s unbridled AI ambitions.

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Kailynn Johnson, writing for The Memphis Flyer:

The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) called xAI’s plans to construct and operate 41 methane-gas turbines in Southaven a “civil rights issue” as opposed to a permitting one.

The advocacy group asked the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) to deny MZX Tech, an affiliate of xAI, to deny the permit for the turbines in question. NAACP sent the letter, signed by Abre’ Conner, director of the NAACP Center for Environmental and Climate Justice, in the wake of a public hearing held by the department as they consider xAI’s permit application.

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