AI supercomputers and environmental racism
Exploring the impact of Colossus in the Boxtown community
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Progress shouldn’t poison Black communities
In Boxtown, a historic Black neighbourhood in South Memphis, Tennessee, 3,000 residents are being forced to breathe toxic air, day in and day out. The reason? Boxtown is also home to 33 gas-powered turbines that power Elon Musk’s AI supercomputer, “Colossus.”
These turbines emit up to 2,000 tonnes of nitrogen oxides every year – gases known to cause respiratory problems and smog. As evidence of the damage, cancer rates in Boxtown are already four times higher than the national average.
While residents are struggling to breathe inside their own homes, deregulation under the current EPA is making it easier for companies like xAI to pollute with little oversight.
Meanwhile, Big Tech spent over $60 million lobbying in 2024 alone to weaken climate protections – meaning these harms could get worse before they get better.
As much as one might hesitate to admit it in a context like this, AI has changed our lives for the better, most of our team use it almost every day. But it’s hard to celebrate a technology that’s literally harming communities like Boxtown.
This is environmental racism in action. Unlike other tech industries that shipped their dirty work overseas, AI’s huge infrastructure has to be near reliable power and internet – so it’s being dumped where people have the least power to resist.
Now, the question is this: how do we hold tech companies accountable and force them to stop harming communities? Is that even possible? And now that we know what AI is doing, are we complicit by using it?
These are all questions worth thinking about, because right now, the promise of AI is coming at an unacceptable cost. What do you think?
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