Memphis residents are getting a chance to tell Mayor Paul Young and council members how they want tax dollars from the xAI over the next six weeks, but a cloud still hangs over the project. Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer was announced last year and unlike other projects,

As Grok fired off replies on X praising Hitler, the chatbot's parent company also recently got permission to emit 97 tons of carbon monoxide per year to keep it running.

The takeaway, at least from a technical standpoint, is that Grok 4 is now firmly in frontier-model territory. That’s a meaningful shift for xAI, which just months ago was primarily known for its integration with X, the rechristened Twitter owned by Musk. xAI is clearly trying to be taken seriously as a legitimate AI research and enterprise company.

Elon Musk's plans to ship an overseas power plant to Memphis for an xAI supercomputer raise both interest and environmental concerns.

Grok 4 was trained on Colossus, a supercomputer that xAI launched in Memphis last year. The system featured 100,000 graphics cards when it came online in September. According to xAI, that number topped 200,000 in May and will eventually reach 1 million.

After months of backlash over alleged pollution concerns, xAI has finally secured an air permit covering some of the methane gas turbines powering its Colossus supercomputer data center in Memphis, Tennessee.

While xAI promised to resolve the issue, many are asking for elected leaders to take a stand against the company’s presence in Memphis. The Greater Memphis Chamber and other xAI proponents have not released a statement on the matter.

The four recent hires will be part of OpenAI’s scaling team, which is reportedly responsible for managing the backend AI infrastructure.