These generators polluted the nearby historically black neighborhoods in Memphis Tennessee with nitrogen oxides. Residents are afraid to open their windows, with the elderly, children and those suffering from conditions like COPD particularly affected. Lawsuits alleging environmental racism are pending.
xAI says cleaner generators will be installed but I think this episode shows that we cannot allow public interests to be compromised by private sector so easily just because they scream: Jobs! Investment!
I'm incredibly skeptical of any claim that xAI's power use is putting a dent in the local environment, and "environmental racism" just reeks of the usual agenda pushing.
https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/xai-datacen...
80ish% in the US live <100 miles from their hometown.
It would be wise to see "jobs!" Investment!" as little more than a mafioso like threat to agrarian-stay in one place-work to live types. "Sure is a nice Shire you got there. Better hope it doesn't suffer from lack of investment in jobs."
Threats of it all imploding are taken seriously by a lot of people.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/culture/generations/millennials-...
So what if it does? That's normal with the passage of time. As long as human biology exists humans will solve for those problems. Beyond that obligation is just socialized memes, ethno objects that come and go with the generations.
Everyone alive now worried about propagation of our culture sure does not seem concerned Latin fell out of common use. That they aren't spending their lives keeping old traditions alive should make it obvious old traditions don't mean that much to the living.
Politicians and rich need us servicing debt they so graciously took on to invest in jobs or we would be free to police them.
It implies that if this were happening near a non black neighborhood, it wouldn’t be as egregious, which is a strange moral stance.
Also 'historically' is irrelevant. Pollution hurts the people living there now.
Here's an article about what happened literally where I'm sitting: https://kingneighborhood.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/BLEE...
Stories like this played all all over the US. Read up on Robert Moses for example.
Not that you intended it, but your comment veers close to the sort of "why do black people always talk about racism" thought ending cliche or similar demands to be "colorblind" that ultimately are only functionally used to shut down conversations about extant and continuing racism.
The point is that this type of environmental pollution only is allowed to happen in poor areas that are disproportionately black because of decades of systemic racism like red lining.
If that concept makes you uncomfortable, that's a good thing, it should. But you should resist the urge to deny the existence of ideas that are inconvenient
I read it the other way: that it simply wouldn't happen in a white neighborhood.
Please read the article I linked in another reply to you.
My neighborhood was prosperous when it was systematically stolen from the black people who built it. They literally razed a thriving business district. And then the land sat empty for decades, only in the end to be sold to property developers.
They used eminent domain to steal people's homes and businesses in a way that was blatantly criminal, but the victims had no recourse given the courts and entire rest of the political structure was complicit in the actions.
And variations of this story played out everywhere across America.
So yes, the fact that a neighborhood is historically black is relevant, because it shows the events of today are part of a continued arc of injustice.
The agenda, as it is every day, is how to externalize costs so that megacompanies don’t have to spend more money to keep our environment clean.
It feels racist to expect people to assume a neighborhood is 'resource poor' just because it is 'historically black'.
Also, the OP explicitly states that lawsuits are pending. Clearly, the community was able to mount a legal defense
Statistically poverty is correlated with race. For reasons to do with (quite recent) history.
Crime rates also statistically correlate with demographics, but if I assume a specific person is a criminal based on that stat, I would (rightly) be called racist.
Expecting people to assume 'historically black' == 'poor' similarly feels racist.
Who said anything about a specific person? They are talking about a neighborhood, in a urban area in a region known for the endemic poverty in black-majority areas due to the long shadow of slavery and Jim Crow.
As a wise character once said, "poverty is a condition, not a crime".
> > Expecting people to assume 'historically black' == 'poor' similarly feels racist.
There are a few historically black communities in the US that are middle-class and prosperous, and Black Americans have made huge advances, but to this day, concentrations of Black American community prosperity tend to be the exception rather than the rule.
The facts of history show this. It is not a subtle statistical effect.
People who argue the way that you have been are either woefully ignorant of this matter or are playing games trying to justify the status quo, or are just racist trolls. This isn't a FAQ on HN because it's a FAQ in real life.
Namely - I think most agree that it's racist to mindlessly assume race and poverty are correlated. The argument here is that the AI companies made that assumption - in other words, they're being called racists.
I don't think it's racist to speculate that a corporation, that made choices that specifically impact black neighborhoods, is racist.
My city has a big NG facility downtown that pipes heated water to a bunch of buildings, and it is surrounded by condos. I've never heard anything about it impacting the air (other than CO2 which is a global and not local issue).
Every building here (except for those connected to district heating systems), large and small, has a natural gas boiler or furnace. We have also several NG plants generating electricity within city limits. Again, localized pollution is not what concerns people about these things. Coal plants, on the other hand, tended to be way outside the city when they were still in operation.
Large gas plants are probably relatively clean overall, but the temporary, portable gas generators used by eg the xAI datacenter are not as tightly regulated and aren’t inspected or controlled in the same way. Given the particular corporate agent involved, I’d be surprised if any care at all were being taken to minimize air pollution caused by these portable generators.
And there are also decorative and/or supplemental gas heating devices which exhaust into the home.
You hear AI folks including Trump's AI Tsar David Sachs frequently promoting what happened in Tennessee as the future of AI power generation. They're calling it "behind the meter" power generation. Understand that this is what it is: generating gigawatts of power with dozens or hundreds of "small" gas turbines all stacked in one place. Instant, on-demand toxic triangle coming to a data center project near you.
it is about gas turbine high temperature and pressure, not about natural gas. That is why diesel engine does it too, while it isn't such an issue for regular gas engine, nor for "simple" LNG burners/heaters.
What xAI does here sounds horrendous. 270MW of gas turbines dumping the exhaust straight into the neighborhood. It is like 1000 diesel trucks running their engine full power 24x7 near your house.
Basically, it looks like the whole "xAI poisoning black neighborhoods" thing is the usual FUD by the usual agenda pushers.
https://www.facebook.com/abacustrategic/posts/pfbid02rrUwoWM...
https://maps.app.goo.gl/fYwcSi8vfPBnsYeK7
I don't doubt that it is a source of pollution, but I agree that this is overblown in the same was as the claims that datacentres are using up all the fresh water.
https://www.thesidewalksymposium.com/blog/the-enduring-shado... , here is a quick overview of redlining in Memphis
Mississippi in particular is well known at the state government level to actively choose not to enforce environmental regulations in areas where its Black citizens live.
My takeaway is they get it correct enough but no deep insight on the power generation industry.
I was surprised by and learned a few things from the article though. Definitely gives me some ideas of reaching out to old contacts to see if there’s any opportunities with building models and analytics for the new demands.
Focusing on Bloom is fun because they’re new and startup vibes but Innio and cat are really having a resurgence of demand with their generators and building diesel/natg engines is much simpler than gas turbines. I’m sure the heads at GE wish they hadn’t sold that off now.
On steam/gas turbine blade manufacturing there most certainly are more big players than 4 and many US based. You have to remember this is an old industry with existing supply chains and maintenance companies.
As long as the demand for new data centers doesn’t lose steam these onsite options will continue to flourish. Fed grid access builds are currently a 10+ year wait and they are reworking the system to be “fast”, only 5-6 years for build outs now. They’re also changing how the bidding process works which was touched on here. You need skin in the game if you want to be taken seriously now. There’s so many requests from companies arbing who can give them the best deal/timeline. Now you need to put money up if you even want a call back.
Yes, all sources are biased, but some are useful. And I know that it's hard to get solid data on this from AI companies, but we must have at least a rough estimate?
Please don't tell me to ask ChatGPT about it :)
So that's 67Mt CO2, I hope I haven't misplaced my decimal point, please double check. That would be 1.3% of the 5Gt of CO2 the US emits per year.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/carbon-intensity-electric...
https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/R48646#_Toc207199546
For global emission and future trends the IEA estimates about 500TWh/year globally today, and 1000TWh/year in 2030 (base scenario). Assuming these use the current US grid carbon intensity, that would be about 200MtCO2 today, 400 in 2030. Global CO2 emissions today are 40Gt/year, so that would be 0.5% today, and 1% in 2030 (if global emissions stay stable).
https://www.iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-data-c...
1% (if that’s accurate) isn’t nothing, but it’s also nowhere near what seems to be implied by the level of people’s reaction to AI buildout and the framing as an environmental catastrophe. (Of course there are other factors, such as local pollution from gas turbines.)
Interesting comparisons are blast furnaces (6% of global emissions) and aviation (2.5%). Both arguably more economically necessary than AI, for sure, but if we could make either of those meaningfully less of a contributor to climate change we’d have covered the whole AI buildout. And that’s not even getting into the possibility of a transition to solar energy for running datacenters, which China is already deep into and in which the US is far behind.
So the benchmark is achieving human-like intelligence on a 100W budget. I'd be very curious to see what can be achieved by AI targeting that power budget.
Similarly, I've had times where it wrote me scientific simulation code that would take me 2 days, in around a minute.
Obviously I'm cherry-picking the best examples, but I would guess that overall, the energy usage my LLM queries have required is vastly less than my own biological energy usage if I did the equivalent work on my own. Plus it's not just the energy to run my body -- it's the energy to house me, heat my home, transport my groceries, and so forth. People have way more energy needs than just the kilocalories that fuel them.
If you're using AI productively, I assume it's already much more energy-efficient than the energy footprint of a human for the same amount of work.
In that case I think it would be only fair to also count the energy required for training the LLM.
LLMs are far ahead of humans in terms of the sheer amount of knowledge they can remember, but nowhere close in terms of general intelligence.
That is certainly not a logical leap I'm making. AI doesn't make anybody redundant, the same way mechanized farming didn't. It just frees them up to do more productive things.
Now consider whether LLM's will ultimately speed up the technological advancements necessary to reduce CO2? It's certainly plausible.
Think about how much cloud computing and open sourced changed it so you could launch a startup with 3 engineers instead of 20. What happened? An explosion of startups, since there were so many more engineers to go around. The engineers weren't delivering pizzas instead.
Same thing is happening with anything that needs more art -- the potential for video games here is extraordinary. A trained artist is way more effective leveraging AI and handling 10x the output, as the tools mature. Now you get 10x more video games, or 10x more complex/larger worlds, or whatever it is that the market ends up wanting.
I agree human brains are crazy efficient though.
A computer uses orders of magnitude less energy than a human.
It's all about the task, humans are specialized too.
EDIT: maybe add a logarithm or other non-linear functions to make the gap even bigger.
But either way, how many human lives are spent making that file?
I can generate images or get LLM answers in below 15 seconds on mundane hardware. The image generator draws many times faster than any normal person, and the LLM even on my consumer hardware still produces output faster than I can type (and I'm quite good at that), let alone think what to type.
There's many things to say on this. Free is worthless. Speed is not necessarily a good thing. The image generation is drivel. But...
The main nail in the coffin is accountability. I can't trust my work if I can't trust the output of the machine. (and as a bonus, the machine can't build a house. It's single purpose).
Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
> Also, why are people moving mountains to make huge, power obliterating datacenters if actually "its fine, its not that much"?
I presume that's mostly training, not inference. But in general anything that serves millions of requests in a small footprint is going to look pretty big.
Great analogy.
> An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
What? I let ChatGPT swag an answer on the revenue forecast and it cited $2-6B rev per GW year.
And then we get this gem...
> Wärtsilä, historically a ship engine manufacturer, realized the same engines that power cruise ships can power large AI clusters. It has already signed 800MW of US datacenter contracts.
So now we're going to be spewing ~486 g CO₂e per kWh using something that wasn't designed to run 24/7/365 to handle these workloads? These datacenters choosing to use these forms of power should have to secure a local vote showcasing, and being held to, annual measurements of NOx, CO, VOC and PM.
This article just showcases all the horrible bandaids being applied to procure energy in any way possible with little regard to health or environmental impact.
This article is coming from one of the premier groups doing financial and technical analysis on the semiconductor industry and AI companies.
I trust their numbers a hundred times more than a ChatGPT guess.
It doesn't matter who they are if there's nothing backing it up.
The entire article is predicated on the fact that this is profitable long term.
Again: > An AI cloud can generate revenue of $10-12 billion dollars per gigawatt, annually.
Yet this simple fact isn't justified at all nor is it stated what "AI cloud" actually is or how they got to those numbers.
However, it is worth saying that xAI’s “solution” was illegal, unhealthy for the local constituents, and stinks of corruption, https://insideclimatenews.org/news/17072025/elon-musk-xai-da....
[1] https://www.heise.de/en/news/850-MW-World-s-largest-battery-...
And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money
The demand for both compute and electricity is higher while people are awake and using them. But not all demand is realtime, and some will shift in response to prices.
A lot of the super expensive queries are flexible. Especially the agentic coding ones. And higher use naturally follows the sun anyway.
> And every second GPU is not working, it's not making money
Some companies already have more chips than they can feed, so if that continues then sure why not let it idle part of the night.
haha how do you figure? with how much time people spend playing league of legends, watching tiktok and standing in line for "Free" shit, i think their time is actually quite flexible
Acquiring enough solar panels and battery storage still takes a very long time by comparison.
The footprint needed when trying to generate this much power from solar or wind necessitates large-scale land acquisition plus the transmission infrastructure to get all that power to the actual data center, since you won't usually have enough land directly adjacent to it. That plus all the battery infrastructure makes it a non-starter for projects where short timescales are key.
> Eighteen months ago, Elon Musk shocked the datacenter industry by building a 100,000-GPU cluster in four months. Multiple innovations enabled this incredible achievement, but the energy strategy was the most impressive.
> Again, clever firms like xAI have found remedies. Elon's AI Lab even pioneered a new site selection process - building at the border of two states to maximize the odds of getting a permit early!
The energy strategy was to completely and almost certainly illegally bypass permitting and ignore the Clean Air Act, at a tangible cost to the surrounding community by measurably increasing respiratory irritants like NOx in the air around these communities. Characterizing this harm as "clever" is wildly irresponsible, and it's wild that the word "illegal" doesn't appear in the article once, while at the same time handwaving the fact that permitting for local combustion-based generation (for these reasons!) is one of the main factors to pushing out timelines and increasing cost.
[1] https://time.com/7308925/elon-musk-memphis-ai-data-center/
[2] https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...
[3] https://naacp.org/articles/elon-musks-xai-threatened-lawsuit...
was why not solar ? Yeah Hydrocarbons have no competition if you have to deploy power quickly
1.2GW is a small turbine - compared to the land & battery needed for Solar.
how about Gas ? if you're building in the middle of nowhere ? & there's no gas lines ?
It didn't make long-term sense for our world before AI. It makes no more sense with AI.
Like every other industry in the world?
I’m kind of amazed that AI data centers have become the political talking point for topics like water usage and energy use when they’re just doing what every other energy-intensive industry does. The food arriving at your grocery store and the building materials that built your house also came from industries that consume a lot of fossil fuels to make more money.
I also love how you can see the physical evidence of them pitting jurisdictions against each other from the satellite photos with the data center on one side of a state border and the power generation on the other.
*greed.
We are well past the point that any economic growth at all is anything but a distribution of income problem.
This seems like a big reach for me. Their largest engine (and it is absolutely massive) "only" produces 80MW of power. The Brayton cycle is unbeatable if you need to keep scaling power up to ridiculous levels.
Really makes me wonder about anything else I've read on Semianalysis. Like, it is such an insane thing to claim and so easy to check. And they just wrote it anyway, like some kind of pathological fabulists.
But what's the part that seems like a "big reach"? Are you saying they didn't sign those contracts? That their customers are making a mistake?
And yes of course it's a race, everything being equal nobody's going to use your model if someone else has a better model.
The other big problem is that you can always increase the scale to compensate for the energy efficiency. I do wonder if they'll eventually level this off though. If performance somehow plateaus then presumably the efficiency gains will catch up. That being said, that doesn't seem to be a thing in the near future.
So they solved the power problem by consuming more fossil fuel. Got it.
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
It's not the grid's technological limitation. We could have lived in a world with a more connected grid, more nibble utility commissions, and a lot less methane/carbon emissions as a result of it
https://qz.com/boom-supersonic-jet-startup-ai-data-center-po...
What is interesting is how many people saw the Boom announcement and came to believe that Boom was a pioneer of this idea. They’re actually a me-too that won’t have anything ready for a long time, if they can even pull it off at all.
Boom has been operating on vaporware for a while. It’s one of those companies I want to see succeed but whatever they’re doing in public is just PR right now. Until they actually produce something (other than a prototype that doesn’t resemble their production goals using other people’s parts) their PR releases don’t mean a whole lot.
My first thought when seeing that article is “I can buy one of these right now from Siemens or GE, and I could’ve ordered one at any time in the last 50 years.”
Citation needed.
Assuming a single 1GW the data center runs 24/7 365, it’s consuming 8.76 TwH per year. Only being able to generate $10-$12B in revenue (not profit) per year while consuming as much electricity as the entire state of Hawaii (1.5M people) seems awful.
I think that's most people's assumption. It's not that AI is worthless, but that it's significantly less valuable than investors are betting on.
That said, it is all pretty impressive.
Wow, "truck-mounted gas turbines"? Who else could have mastered such a futuristic tech in so short a time? Seriously, who wrote this? Grok? And let's ignore that this needless burning of fossil fuel is making life on Earth harder for everyone and everything else.
The problem ordinary people all over the world have is that governments are allowing this to happen. Maybe if there were stricter regulation it will prevent players such as Musk to come up with such "innovations".
https://techcrunch.com/2025/07/03/xai-gets-permits-for-15-na...
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Natural Gas supply problem: worsened
Carbon in the atmosphere problem: worsened
> Nicole Pastore, who has lived in her large stone home near Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University campus for 18 years, said her utility bills over the past year jumped by 50%. “You look at that and think, ‘Oh my god,’” she said. She has now become the kind of mom who walks around her home turning off lights and unplugging her daughter’s cellphone chargers.
> And because Pastore is a judge who rules on rental disputes in Baltimore City District Court, she regularly sees poor people struggling with their own power bills. “It’s utilities versus rent,” she said. “They want to stay in their home, but they also want to keep their lights on.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-elec...
That said, it obviously sucks that utility prices are rising for people who can not effortlessly cover that (not to speak of the local pollution, if that's an issue). Maybe some special tax to offset that cost to society towards hyper scalers would be a reasonable way to soften the blow, but I have not done the math.
Mom/Dad used to unplug things and turn lights off, so they do too.
This short term, destructive, thinking should be criminalized.
I think it's time to discuss changing the incentives around ai deployment, specifically paying into a ubi fund whenever human jobs are replaced by ai. Musk himself raised the idea.
https://www.indexbox.io/blog/tech-leaders-push-for-universal...
Coal plants are bad.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
[That read as snark, didn't it? Sorry. I absolutely, completely, 100% agree with everything you say.]
Nothing short of full solar connected to batteries produced without any difficult to mine elements will make some people happy, but as far as pollution and fuel consumption data centers aren’t really a global concern at the same level as things like transportation.
1. Nobody complained about the efficiency of natural gas turbines. You can efficiently do a lot of useless stuff with deep negative externalities, and the fact it's efficient is not all that helpful.
2. Saying "the extreme far end would not be satisfied even by much better solutions" is not an excuse not to pursue better solutions!
3. There are many dimensions of this that people care about beyond the "global concern" level regarding "pollution and fuel consumption."
4. There are many problems that are significant and worth thinking about even if they are not the largest singular problems that could be included by some arbitrarily defined criteria
Unnecessarily condescending and smug, but I’ll try to respond.
That said, you’re putting forth your own disingenuous assumptions and misconceptions. The natural gas turbines are an intermediate solution to get up and running due to the extremely long and arduous process of getting connected to the grid.
Arguing pedantry about the word efficiency isn’t helpful either. The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that. The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
Disingenuous is acting like this is a permanent solution to the exclusion of others. The whole point is that it gets them started now with portable generation that is efficient.
Unnecessarily smug?
Beyond that they can be stopped. They're being met with a lot of resistance in the Midwest as they're attempting to be built without much understanding of the public utilities impact. People are catching on to the fact that energy and water consumption is pushing up costs for residents. A lot of assumptions are supporting this argument.
> The gas turbines are an efficient way to power them while waiting for grid interconnect and longterm renewables to come online.
I like the gymnastics of wordplay here. Efficient only when you look at them through the lens of some ephemeral timeframe that may or may not exist.
> The data centers are being built, sorry to anyone who gets triggered by that.
It's obvious that you're starting from your conclusion and working backwards, which is probably how your initial comment was full of so much motivated reasoning to begin with.
In your mind, is there any set of negative externalities that would justify not building the data centers, or at least not building them now, or at least not building them now in specific areas that require these types of interim solutions?
Same level doesn't remove the concern for this unnecessary pollution. Stop changing the subject from the environmental problems that AI usage can have by their increased power consumption.
Natural gas engines are efficient!
Ok! But what about the pollution they produce to nearby neighborhoods? What about the health repercussions? Do human lives not matter?
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Not so.
wow, that's some logic. Environmentally unsound means of extracting energy directly damage the ecosystem in which humans need to live. The need for a functioning ecosystem "dwarfs" "problems" like billionaires not making enough billions. Fixing a ruined ecosystem would cost many more billions than whatever economic revenue the AI generated while ruining it. So if you're not harnessing the sun or wind (forget about the latter in the US right now, btw), you're burning things, and you can get lost with that.
This kind of short sighted thinking is because when folks like this talk about generating billions of dollars of worth, their cerebellums are firing up as they think of themselves personally as billionaires, corrupting their overall thought processes. We really need to tax billionaires out of existence.
LLMs/diffusers are inefficient from a traditional computing perspective, but they are also the most efficient technology humanity has created:
> AI systems (ChatGPT, BLOOM, DALL-E2, Midjourney) and human individuals performing equivalent writing and illustrating tasks. Our findings reveal that AI systems emit between 130 and 1500 times less CO2e per page of text generated compared to human writers, while AI illustration systems emit between 310 and 2900 times less CO2e per image than their human counterparts.
