Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot, Grok, is notorious for polluting the “cloud” with deepfakes and racist content. But in the Memphis metropolitan area, it’s under fire for literally polluting the air. MS NOW's Josh Einiger reports from the Tennessee-Mississippi border, where Grok’s “supercomputer” is located in massive data centers.
Elon Musk’s controversial chatbot, Grok, is notorious for polluting the “cloud” with sexual deepfakes and racist content. But in the Memphis metropolitan area, it’s under fire for literally polluting the air. Grok’s “supercomputer” is located in massive data centers on the Tennessee-Mississippi border, powered by dozens of gas-burning turbines emitting harmful particulate matter linked to asthma, lung cancer and heart attacks. In April, the NAACP sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech, claiming the fleet of turbines violates the Clean Air Act, by taking advantage of a loophole of sorts: Because their turbines are technically on wheels, Mississippi law considers them “portable” and not subject to permitting constraints,…
A supercomputer in Shenzhen was declared the world’s fastest. It uses only standard microprocessors and not the special-purpose chips called graphics processing units.
Proposals include transferring a supercomputer to the University of Wyoming and shifting a space weather lab to a private company.
The National Science Foundation said management of the machine, used by researchers for forecasts, disaster warnings and pure science, would be transferred to a “third-party operator.”