Since Elon Musk announced that he’ll be stepping back from his daily work with doge, perhaps you’ve been wondering if he has anything else to fill that time now that he’s shut down operations at America’s humanitarian-aid provider, wrecked much of the nation’s scientific-research infrastructure, and disrupted the communications systems at the Social Security Administration. One way to find out would be to ask Grok, his entry in the A.I. sweepstakes. “Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, has been making significant moves in Memphis,” Grok reports. “But these have sparked controversy.”

Indeed they have. Last year, Musk’s team secured an abandoned factory that used to belong to Electrolux, the vacuum-cleaner people on the edge of the city’s Boxtown neighborhood. As Musk explained at the time, “That’s why it’s in Memphis, home of Elvis and also one of the oldest—I think it was the capital of ancient Egypt.” With typical modesty, he renamed his vacuum factory Colossus, and started stuffing it with Nvidia graphics-processing units, or G.P.U.s, the basic building blocks of A.I. systems. At the moment, he has two hundred thousand of these G.P.U.s, and he’s headed for a million; by some estimates, he is expected to build the “largest supercomputer” in the world.

All that processing takes power to run, and so the xAI team moved about thirty-five mobile methane-gas-powered generators onto the site to support the data center. These are truck-mounted units, many of them designed by Caterpillar, which give off some of the same brew of pollutants as other gas-combustion device—including nitrogen oxides and formaldehyde—and which are currently operating without a permit. “xAI has essentially built a power plant in South Memphis with no oversight, no permitting, and no regard for families living in nearby communities,” the Southern Environmental Law Center said, in a report released in April. (Full disclosure: I volunteer every year to judge the S.E.L.C.’s Phil Reed prize for best environmental writing about the South). The S.E.L.C. has called for an “emergency order” from the city to require xAI to cease the use of these generators, with a twenty-five-thousand-dollar daily fine if the company refuses. The mayor of Memphis, Paul Young, a supporter of the project, addressed the concerns at a meeting with community members in March. “I want to figure out how we can exploit this project for us,” he said. “I know you all feel like it’s us getting exploited, but we need to speak from a place of strength.” After the S.E.L.C. issued its report, Young explained that the company has a permit application pending with the Shelby County Health Department to run fifteen generators. “There are thirty-five, but there are only fifteen that are on,” he said. “The other ones are stored on the site.”

It turns out that Young may be wrong about that number. SouthWings, a group of volunteer pilots who help monitor environmental problems, overflew the site with thermal-imaging equipment that showed at least thirty-three of the generators giving off lots of heat—indicating that they were fired up and running at the same time. (Young’s office and xAI didn’t respond to requests for comment.) Taken together, they would produce about four hundred and twenty megawatts of power—the equivalent of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s big gas-fired power plant nearby.

Memphis was, indeed, home to Elvis—but it was also, of course, where Martin Luther King, Jr., who came to the city to support striking sanitation workers, was assassinated, and it remains a place of sharp economic and racial division. It will surprise no one to learn that the neighborhoods in South Memphis surrounding Musk’s facility—including Boxtown and Westwood—are predominantly Black and also home to a number of industrial facilities, including chemical plants and an oil refinery. The area already has elevated levels of pollution compared with leafier precincts, and, according to Politico’s E…E News, “already leads the state in emergency department visits for asthma.” Those same neighborhoods came together at the beginning of the decade to fight, and ultimately defeat, the proposed forty-nine-mile-long crude-oil Byhalia pipeline, which would have run through the area. In that process, a new political star emerged: Justin Pearson, a young African American who rode that battle into the state legislature (from which he was later expelled for joining an anti-gun-violence protest on the floor of the Tennessee House after a shooting at a Christian school, only to soon be reappointed by the county and reëlected to office in the next election).

Pearson and his brother KeShaun, the director of a group called Memphis Community Against Pollution, are now helping lead the fight against xAI. They were prominent voices at a town hall of the Shelby County Health Department in late April, which a local NBC affiliate described as “unlike any other town hall in recent memory, with dozens of Shelby County sheriff’s deputies, Memphis police officers and Tennessee Highway Patrol troopers standing inside and outside of Fairley High School.” Citizens were allowed two minutes each to speak, but there were no responses to questions; after two hours the proceedings ended.

A company spokesman was shouted down at the meeting, but his written statement insisted that “XAl is going above and beyond the required emission control requirements. The Solar SMT-130 turbines will be equipped with SoLoNOx dry low emissions (D.L.E.) technology and selective catalytic reduction (S.C.R.) systems that lower nitrogen oxides (NOx) to 2 ppm.” The “Solar” here, though, has nothing to do with the power source—it’s the name of Caterpillar’s turbine division, which stems from the Solar Aircraft Company, founded in the late nineteen-twenties, whose name was derived from the fact that it was based in sunny San Diego.)

“I feel like my community is being disrespected,” Justin Pearson (whom I got to know during the Byhalia fight) told me in an e-mail. “I feel like my friends and neighbors and family members are being ignored—both by xAI itself and city leaders championing this data center that is emitting pollution into our air. Some of those leaders have mentioned the money that xAI will supposedly bring to Memphis, but what good is money if we have to struggle with polluted air? As the elders here say, ‘All money ain’t good money.’ ” He added, “Folks are angry and fearful. Some neighbors have expressed fear about letting children play outside or not enjoying time in their backyards because they don’t know what kind of pollution is in the air.”

Had Musk wanted to proceed differently, he could have. A report last year, from researchers at a number of energy and tech firms, made it clear that building arrays of solar microgrids is a quick and highly affordable plan for powering such data centers. “While building off-grid solar microgrids of this magnitude would be a first, it’s very possible to do with technology that exists today, and to scale it quickly,” the researchers found. They actually looked at Musk’s Memphis project and concluded that its use of portable gas generators was at best a one-off solution: “Most users of rental power plan to transition once possible because this approach carries very high costs and generally reliability is lower than permanent infrastructure.”

But cost is evidently not a big issue for Musk. (doge claims to have saved a hundred and sixty billion dollars in government spending, but a new analysis by the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service estimates that it only did so at a cost of a hundred and thirty-five billion dollars, because it has operated so quickly and ineptly.) Neither, judging from doge’s performance, is saving lives, but he could help do so in Memphis, if he wanted to. Pearson says, “Solar panels and battery storage would be a much cleaner alternative to methane gas turbines. Solar panels also don’t pump smog-forming pollution or chemicals like formaldehyde into nearby communities.”

More to the point, Musk’s actions in Memphis seem to presuppose that his experience in Washington will prove typical. There, he managed to enact his slash-and-burn damage in a few short weeks before leaving town, albeit with an approval rating even lower than the President’s. In Tennessee, he’s running into forces seasoned by several generations of struggle. During the Byhalia-pipeline dispute, Pearson recalled, “a representative from the pipeline company called my community the ‘path of least resistance.’ It seems like corporations don’t expect us to fight back, but we’ve proven that wrong time and time again. We’re going to do it again.”