In the shadows of America’s industrial past, Memphis has always been a city at a crossroads — cotton and river trade, blues and barbecue, railways and redlines. Now, another chapter unfolds in the city’s uneasy relationship with progress: Elon Musk’s xAI data center, a shimmering monument to artificial intelligence that, locals allege, is poisoning the very air they breathe.

The promise of AI often comes packaged in glossy metaphors: the “cloud,” the “brain of the future,” the “electric frontier.” But behind the slogans are servers — rows upon rows of them, burning through electricity with a voracious appetite that rivals a small nation’s. In Memphis, that appetite has taken on a darker metaphor: one of sacrifice zones and invisible smog.

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