The parade of misleading and exaggerated hit pieces in the news must be seen as part of the integrated plan to destroy American science, information, and research.
> In just 11 months since the company arrived in Memphis, xAI has become one of Shelby County’s largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides, according to calculations by environmental groups whose data has been reviewed by POLITICO’s E&E News. The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
Had this set the precedent of working with the community, and _not_ breaking the law, I think we'd be in a better place all around.
Similarly, Amazon tried to take the excess nuclear power, without paying back into the electrical grid infrastructure, and got denied in 2024:
Yeah, that politico article conveniently leaves out that the TVA - the local electricity provider - runs a methane-powered gas power plant literally 200 meters down the road (which replaced a much dirtier coal-burning power station at the same location), but somehow could not be bothered actually hooking their neighbours up to the grid.
I presume they couldn't be bothered hooking their "neighbors" [0] up because the demand was too great, no...?
[0] "Neighbors" here means a datacenter primarily processing data for wealthy people outside of the community and their mega-companies, where the revenue from that processing primarily goes... also to wealthy people outside of the community and their mega-companies...
Datacenters are not things that just randomly appear. There are planning processes, and city stakeholders are involved - which would include the TVA. The fact that they built the thing is a good indication that the stakeholders agreed this project should go forward - and that would involve an agreement on power provisioning.
But what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry, including a steel works and - a methane-burning power plant. To put the blame now on the xAI site smells a lot like an anti-Musk hit piece.
Doesn't mean I like the guy. I just like my journalism honest.
I don't really understand the point you're making.
It seems like you're suggesting that Politico didn't mention that the area already had pollution problems prior to xAI, but that's literally the very first sentence of the article:
> Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company is belching smog-forming pollution into an area of South Memphis that already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.
It's restated in the 5th sentence:
> The plant is in an area whose air is already considered unhealthy due to smog.
The power plant down the street is mentioned in the 6th sentence:
> 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.
So I have to deduce that your actual complaint is that the article didn't say something to the effect of, "xAI is adding a bunch of emissions, but don't worry because the people there were already well-abused by other nearby emission sources?"
> what I strongly disagree with in the politico article is that the datacenter is framed as a major polluter when the whole area is heavy industry,
The xAI data center is a major polluter. In fact it's a major polluter even in an area full of major polluters! It produces more NOx than the gigantic power plant that powers the region.
> Must R&D be prioritized over quality of life, environment, and be subsidized by local tax breaks/grants?
Yes, yes and maybe, if it needs to be accelerated.
No part of our modern life would exist without scientific and engineering advancement. Centuries of inventions and discoveries have built on top of each other to give us the very essential (housing, plumbing, food production) that are vast improvements on the original as well as the very boutique (space travel, self-driving cars, AI), the benefits from which are not fully realized yet. Pressing pause on science is guaranteed to cause misery. The last time Europe did that it lead to the Dark and Middle ages, leading to centuries of suffering.
Science is one of those few things that benefits everyone, from the very rich to the very poor. It's how we ensure that life does not remain a zero-sum game, it's how we grow the pie so that everyone can have more. Science is not free: It comes at a cost, but that cost is repaid many times over.
I addressed the general point since the question was around whether R&D should be prioritized. Whether data centers are required for R&D (or not) is up for debate. Clearly, science to date has not been impeded by the absence of such data centres. Would their existence accelerate science? I suspect a correlation exists but not a strong one.
_This_ article is objective. The opposition this article is discussing has been whipped into existence by the past year or so of exaggerated hit pieces.
