Power Without Permission: AI Data Centers and Black Memphis

In South Memphis, the future of artificial intelligence arrived on trailers. When Elon Musk's company xAI set up its "Colossus" supercomputer in a former appliance factory, it also brought in dozens of gas-burning turbines to power it. The people breathing that air live in Boxtown, White Haven and the surrounding neighborhoods, which are mostly Black. They were not consulted. For them, the newest technology on earth repeats one of the oldest stories in American life: Black neighborhoods get the industrial costs, and other people get the benefits.

What a data center is, and why it is so hungry

A data center is a building full of computers. Rows of servers store and process the information behind email, banking, streaming video and, more and more, AI programs. The biggest "hyperscale" centers, built for companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, run day and night.

All that computing takes two things in huge amounts: electricity and cooling. A single hyperscale site can draw as much power as roughly 100,000 homes and use millions of gallons of water a day to keep its machines from overheating. When the local power grid cannot keep up, companies look for shortcuts. In Memphis, the shortcut was a fleet of portable turbines.

Boxtown's long fight

Boxtown has a history of having to fight. Formerly enslaved people founded it after the Civil War, and its name is said to come from the boxcar scraps early residents used to build homes. Over the twentieth century, South Memphis became home to refineries, a steel mill, a power plant and other heavy industry, and the residents paid with their health.

In 2021, the neighborhood won a major victory. Memphis Community Against the Pipeline, led by young organizers including Justin and KeShaun Pearson, defeated the Byhalia Connection crude-oil pipeline. The pipeline would have run through Black Southwest Memphis and over the Memphis Sand Aquifer, which supplies the city's drinking water. Its backers dropped the project that July. Justin Pearson went on to the Tennessee legislature. That fight taught a lesson that shapes today's battle: South Memphis does not have to accept whatever is built next door.

Turbines without a permit

According to residents and environmental groups, xAI ran dozens of trailer-mounted gas turbines without the air permits a power plant of that size would normally need. The Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and the NAACP have gone to court, accusing the company of running what amounts to a large, unpermitted power plant.

The turbines release nitrogen oxides, which help form smog, along with carbon monoxide and formaldehyde, a chemical linked to cancer. South Memphis already has high rates of asthma and other breathing problems, and cancer risk in the area is above the national average. Neighbors also complain of constant industrial noise. Many fear that the extra demand on the grid and the water supply will raise their utility bills.

Jobs for whom?

Supporters see a different picture. Memphis Mayor Paul Young and the Greater Memphis Chamber have welcomed the investment. They point to billions of dollars in economic activity, hundreds of high-tech jobs and new tax money that could help fund city services.

Residents ask a simple question: who gets those jobs and that money? Data centers need large amounts of land, power and water but relatively few permanent workers once built. The neighborhoods next to the turbines take on the pollution, while the profits and most of the high-paying work go elsewhere. Sociologist Robert D. Bullard named this pattern decades ago in Dumping in Dixie (1990). The modern environmental justice movement grew from protests in 1982 against a toxic landfill in mostly Black Warren County, North Carolina, and from the United Church of Christ's 1987 report Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States, which found that race was the strongest predictor of where hazardous waste sites were located.

A tie vote at City Hall

The conflict has reached City Hall. Meetings have been interrupted by protests and shouting. On October 20, 2026, the Memphis City Council voted 6–6 on a proposed 18-month pause on new data centers, so the measure failed. Members then approved a shorter 135-day pause while permanent zoning rules are written. Mayor Young also issued an executive order creating a task force to study how the city should regulate hyperscale centers and report back in 90 days.

Organizers see the tie vote as a sign of their strength and as a warning. Without lasting rules, the next project could come to South Memphis the same way Colossus did: quickly, quietly and powered by turbines.

Congress takes notice

Memphis is not alone. Data centers have become a national political issue in the 119th Congress. Virginia Rep. Suhas Subramanyam, whose Northern Virginia district has one of the world's largest groups of data centers, has introduced several bills on the industry. Other proposals would make large centers pay for the grid upgrades they require, report how much water and power they use, or pause construction of the biggest AI facilities until national safeguards exist. In September 2026, the House passed the Ratepayer Protection Act 417–3. The bill would make large data centers cover the extra grid costs they create. It has since stalled in the Senate.

Those protections would matter most in places like Boxtown, where families have already paid the cost of other people's progress.

The same story, new machines

The fight over data centers is not a fight against technology. It is a fight over who decides, who benefits and who breathes the exhaust. The Black residents of South Memphis have asked those questions about refineries, power plants and pipelines. Now they are asking them about AI. Their answer has stayed the same: a community that has carried the burden deserves a voice in what comes next, and a fair share of the benefits.

Coming in December: Boxtown is only the newest chapter. From Warren County to Boxtown: The Long Arc of Environmental Racism traces the fight from the 1982 North Carolina landfill protests to Cancer Alley, Flint and today's AI data centers, in the December issue of Black Thread.