Elon Musk stands to earn hundreds of billions of dollars from a SpaceX IPO, but residents living near his xAI data centers in Mississippi and Tennessee are not celebrating. According to Wired, those communities are actively fighting to stop the gas turbines that power xAI's supercomputers — machines that fuel the artificial intelligence products Musk is racing to build.
The friction puts a human face on an abstract debate about AI's energy appetite. Rather than drawing power cleanly from the grid, xAI has relied on fossil-fuel-burning turbines to keep its supercomputers running, and the people who live downwind are bearing the environmental cost.
The anger is sharpened by timing. As Musk prepares for a SpaceX public offering that would generate enormous personal wealth, according to Wired, the neighbors of his AI infrastructure say they are being left to breathe the exhaust of that ambition.
The story matters because it crystallizes a tension that will only grow: the AI industry's insatiable demand for power is landing hardest on the communities closest to the hardware, even as the financial rewards flow almost entirely to investors and founders far removed from the smoke.