AI Moved In Next Door: Inside Memphis Boxtown's Fight Against Elon Musk's Colossus Supercomputer

AI Moved In Next Door. For This Memphis Community, Life Got More Complicated.

On the edge of dense woods in Memphis, Tennessee — an area once inhabited by the Chickasaw Nation — lies a grotto now ringed by barbed wire that protects a new artificial intelligence data center dubbed “Colossus 1” by its creator, Elon Musk.

Just a short crow's flight away sits a historic village called Boxtown, where formerly enslaved people built a community from decommissioned boxcars and old crates in 1863. Today, residents find themselves bouncing between wonder and concern about their unlikely new neighbor.

“When you put all this money on that machine, you ought to either help people with their electric bill or something.”
— Lemoyne Payton, Boxtown resident

Colossus: 300 Megawatts in Four Months

Driven by the AI boom, tech companies have opened nearly 1,200 new data centers in the United States in the past five years, as The Christian Science Monitor reports. Colossus 1 is a massive supercomputer and data center that was used to train Grok, Musk's AI chatbot. Musk reconfigured an old appliance factory in about four months, installing portable natural gas generators to fuel the 300-megawatt processing facility — generators that produce exhaust some say poses a threat to human health.

Grok Is Out. Claude Is In.

In a stunning twist, Musk's SpaceX corporation leased the facility to AI competitor Anthropic to power its fast-growing Claude chatbot at an estimated $1.25 billion per month for computing power at the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis.

So Grok is out. Claude is in. The community of Boxtown remains — in the shadow of a facility that could change hands between billionaires overnight, while the residents' concerns go unaddressed.

“Places Where You Can Externalize the Risk”

“Elon Musk gets a bad play in Memphis, but he's not the problem. It's that places like Boxtown are seen as places where you can externalize the risk and environmental degradation so that people in other places can benefit.”
— Donal Harris, director of the Marcus Orr Center for the Humanities at the University of Memphis

That phenomenon has been at play in Boxtown since its beginnings. In the 1960s, annexation by the city of Memphis promised Boxtowners upgraded services and suburban amenities. But even years after the city began collecting household taxes, little had changed: Most roads were still dirt, and many houses lacked indoor plumbing or electricity as late as 1975.

Despite those hardships, Boxtown grew and prospered. Success came to be defined by self-sufficiency, civic pride, and generational land ownership. As lifelong resident Greg Kinsey puts it: “We're a family.”

A Lawmaker Fights Back

Boxtown local Justin Pearson, a state lawmaker who has challenged the mostly white power structure in Nashville, has been challenging Colossus 1 since its inception. Pearson, who has also fought for stricter gun laws in Memphis, fears that toxic air pollution and regulatory neglect will devastate this low-income community already burdened by industrial hazards.

“We're being told by everybody who's just greenlighting this project like it's the best thing in the world, that this is okay for us to be mistreated.”
— Justin Pearson, Tennessee state lawmaker

The Paradox of Modern Memphis

A Memphis Press-Scimitar photograph from 1961 shows two Boxtown men atop a horse-drawn cart stacked with firewood — in front of a power plant. The image, says Dr. Harris, “perfectly encapsulates the paradox of modern Memphis: Two old guys collecting firewood who live in the shadow of a power plant and don't have electricity.”

Now, Colossus 1 poses the same quandary as that coal plant did a half-century ago. The community that has survived Emancipation, annexation, and official neglect now faces a 300-megawatt AI supercomputer next door — one that could be redirecting the capital, electricity, and water that Boxtown has been denied for over 160 years.

The Bottom Line

Boxtown's story is the story of every community chosen as a host for the AI boom. The technology promises economic transformation, but the physical infrastructure lands in the places least able to resist it — places already burdened by industrial hazards, official neglect, and broken promises.

When a community that has been collecting firewood in the shadow of a power plant for sixty years is told that a $1.25-billion-per-month AI facility next door is “the best thing in the world,” the question isn't whether AI will transform the economy. The question is who pays the cost — and who reaps the reward.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor (via Apple News) · By Patrik Jonsson · July 11, 2026