Colossus: Elon Musk’s supercomputer releases smoke

The facility Elon Musk is using to power his massive “supercomputer” artificial intelligence is visibly emitting smoke in an area of ​​Memphis that is already disproportionately impacted by harmful environmental pollution, as reported by NPR.

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Colossus is powerful and at the same time polluting

Musk announced the AI-focused supercomputer, dubbed Colossus, in a post on X/Twitter last week. Built to power the artificial intelligence model of xAI, his AI-focused company, the supercomputer is designed to work with 100,000 powerful Nvidia H100 graphics processing units (GPUs)or the chips widely used by AI companies to power their AI models.

Musk claims the facility took just 122 days to build and that he hopes to double its size in the coming months. According to NPR, the main purpose of the facility is to power Grok, xAI’s text and image generator.

But tools of Generative AI as the Grok consume a lot of energy. According to NPR, Musk’s Colossus facility is powered in part by 18 methane gas generators, for which the billionaire did not obtain permission.

Already, these gas generators are emitting fumes into the air of the surrounding area — sounding major alarm bells for a community already suffering from disproportionately high rates of cancer and much shorter life expectancy than neighboring areas due to excessive pollution levels.

“They have a very serious air pollution problem“Amanda Garcia, senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, told NPR.”Southwest Memphis is the epicenter.“

Region already suffers from severe air pollution

Worse still, as Forbes first reported in Julycity officials who were aware of the facility signed restrictive confidentiality agreements regarding its construction — meaning the facility was not only built quickly, but without the input or even knowledge of the community members who will bear its physical and environmental consequences.

“We were deemed by xAI as not even valuable enough to have a conversation with“KeShaun Pearson, president of the nonprofit Memphis Community Against Pollution, told NPR.”To not even be included in conversations about what is happening in our own backyards.” According to the report, Pearson grew up just a few miles from where the xAI facility now stands.

Musk has a history of skirting environmental regulations, so none of this is exactly surprising.

But like many other communities in the US, South Memphis is already a place where residents’ health and lives have effectively been sacrificed for the sake of highly polluting industries. Regardless, Musk and xAI are moving forward quickly. And for what? A chatbot that occasionally swears?

“Artificial intelligence can be a cutting-edge technology“, Garcia told NPR.But it is imposing the same kinds of pollution burdens on communities that industrial sources have imposed for the past 100 years.“