Elon Musk's xAI Unveils 'Sustainable' Way To Cool Memphis Data Center Amid Criticism From Environmental Rights Groups

Elon Musk-led artificial intelligence company, xAI, unveiled new technology that will help the company "sustainably" cool its Memphis data center.

What Happened: Taking to social media platform X on Thursday, the company announced it was constructing "the world's largest ceramic membrane bioreactor (MBR) to sustainably supply 13 million gallons per day of cooling water to our Colossus Supercomputer."

A Membrane Bioreactor is a combination of technologies used in wastewater treatment by microfiltration or ultrafiltration with a biological wastewater treatment process in which biological organisms or enzymes are used to filter the water.

xAI says the cooling apparatus will use untreated wastewater from a nearby wastewater treatment plant to cool the Colossus Supercomputer facility.

Why It Matters: The announcement follows criticism of xAI by environmentalists and rights groups for its use of Gas-burning turbines to cool the data center, which critics say increases air pollution in Memphis and disproportionately affects Black-majority communities.

xAI also recently announced Grok for Government, after the company won over $200M worth of defense contracts from the Pentagon to scale the U.S. defense's AI capabilities.

Grok is also being offered on all Tesla Inc. (NASDAQ:TSLA) vehicles in the U.S., with an Advanced Micro Devices Inc.'s (NASDAQ:AMD) Ryzen chipset powering the onboard vehicle computer.

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