Musk's xAI Draws Flak As AI Power Push Hits Black Communities With Toxic Air

xAI's Collossus 2 data centre in Tennessee runs on 59 natural gas turbines, will be disproportionately polluting the air in the surrounding Black communities, and is operating without federal clean air permits, as per a Reuters report on Monday.

The report cited communications between regulators and xAI representatives regarding the development, and identified two times more unpermitted turbines compared to the figures that the company had publicly reported. The firm had claimed that it had set up 27 unpermitted turbine projects as of January, and had contended that they did not neccessitate the aforementioned permits.

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As per the report's analysis, the pollution from these turbine projects is set to largely impact the surrounding Black communities, who are also gauged to be affected by disproportionately high rates of lung disease. The analysis used government data and information from regulators.

Reuters cited a 2022 report from UCLA and Columbia University which attributed this phenomenon to redlining, a practice where banks and financial institutions racially discriminated against Black communities in providing mortgages and loans. This led to them making their homes in "red-lined" areas which were usually unsuitable for human settlement due to heavy underinvestment and proximity to hazardous environments.

The report stated that local authorities fast-tracked such projects, forgoing the required environmental studies and public hearings, which tend to take years. 

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Civil Rights organisations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People (NAACP) and the Southern Environmental Law Center had sued xAI in April due to the company operating such turbine projects across the US in similar situations, without Clean Air permits.

Environmental regulators in Mississippi, which has 57 of 59 turbines that xAI is operating, argued that since these projects were mobile and did not operate "onsite" for over a year, they were not required to have these permits.