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Frankie Goodway,
Saturday Editor
Hi there. Welcome to at least one newsletter this weekend that won’t be about Clacton, the latest heatwave, or the eclipse. Instead, our tech team has dug into what happened when Elon Musk built a vast AI data centre near a community in Memphis for the latest episode of their mini-doc series Misaligned.
It’s a great story and, as often happens, it only got better with time. After filming stopped, Anthropic entered the picture. Surely two AI giants would be twice as good for the city as one?
How Musk’s AI data centre choked Memphis
In 2024, Elon Musk’s AI business xAI built a data centre. It took just under ten months, and it is powered by methane gas turbines – effectively a microgrid of jet engines turned on their sides. And, according to environmental groups suing over the project, all of this happened without any pollution controls or a single air permit.
Keshaun Pearson is a resident and director of local environmental justice non-profit Memphis Community Against Pollution. He says he and the families who live nearby – Colossus was constructed near a historically Black neighbourhood – can taste the pollution in their mouths every day. In the latest episode of Misaligned, we talked to Keshaun outside the data centre… and then security guards showed up.
Ethical questions to answer for Anthropic
The pollution in Memphis raises a lot of awkward questions for Anthropic, the company behind the Claude chatbot. It’s been keen to position itself as the ‘responsible’ good guy in the race between various AI giants. But it has recently signed a deal to use the computing power at xAI’s Colossus – despite Elon Musk’s public spats with the company.
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What we’ve been reading
🔴 How did a small commercial laundry company end up on a list of the US’s worst employers? By putting its exploited employees’ lives on the line nj.com
🔴 Israeli bombing has rendered swathes of southern Lebanon uninhabitable, razing schools, homes, farms and crucial infrastructure to the ground ft.com
🔴 Lobbyists for IKEA and Big Timber have persuaded a global emissions watchdog to consider cutting down trees part of the fight against climate change source-material.org
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