Posted on 06/01/2025 3:03:02 PM PDT by E. Pluribus Unum
MEMPHIS — For decades, this storied American city has watched companies come but mostly go, its vacant storefronts and blighted buildings a reminder of its days as a thriving manufacturing hub and the painful decline that followed as those jobs vanished.
As Paul Young, the city’s mayor, puts it, Memphis has been “the city people forgot about.”
Then last summer, Memphis landed what Young and local business leaders called the city’s largest corporate investment in a generation — a “transformative” development for a place that has struggled to convince outsiders of its continued potential.
The project was something every city dreams of, Young said in a recent interview — an estimated $12 billion private investment that came with no requests for tax incentives or other economic concessions demanded of Memphis in the past, one he believed could create hundreds of jobs. “A gamechanger,” he said.
Then came the mic drop, as some Memphians tell it: The city’s surprise suitor was Elon Musk. The tech billionaire had chosen a long-vacant appliance factory on the city’s south side to be the site of a multibillion-dollar supercomputer that would power his foray into the intense race to develop the world’s most sophisticated artificial intelligence model.
Musk’s plan to launch xAI’s supercomputer was immediately viewed with suspicion and, in some cases, anger by residents who criticized the secrecy around the project and its environmental impact. They questioned how the massive data center’s appetite for power would affect Memphis’s vulnerable electric grid, already prone to sustained blackouts.
That debate has grown only more fraught in recent months, as the Tesla CEO has become one of the most polarizing figures in the country amid his close relationship with President Donald Trump, his embrace of right-wing politics an...
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
It's a valid concern. I'd want a good plan from Musk on how he would manage the power demands.
President Trump’s plan to increase energy production with oil, natural gas, nuclear, and coal is quite attractive.
A nuclear plant near Memphis would be very good for the city.
I think he installs his own power generators. Advanced ones.
Very.
Good for him.
blow them off Musk and built it here in Texas!!
I'd still like to them those (or something like those) as part of the written proposal.
Of course, I live nowhere near Memphis, so my opinion means squat.
Pay to play with the Washington Post. Forget it!
It’s a good question to ask, but there really isn’t anything to worry about because Big Tech is reviving nuclear power to create the needed electricity for these things. They will be independent of the grid, basically.
Memphis is my states butthole.
I hate even driving through it.
Better yet, buuldoze all of Memphis and make it a coal and nuclear power plant campus
So they’re saying: “I’ll take a job...but not from HIM!!” Reeeeee!!
Actually Musk should put another SpaceX base dead center MEM, and then SpaceX launches could immolate Parkway Village and Oakhurst and ...
I agree. Build it just North of Dallas.
Dallas is becoming a new Mecca for high tech.
Yup--as evidenced by EPIC.
Memphis should go back to doing what it has recently proved it can do best: dig up and dishonor dead Tennessee soldiers and their spouses.
I can definitely see why.
No residents said that. Gaslighting crap. Some politicians want graft and they’re picking the wrong guy to shake down.
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