This episode of Surge Engine is brought to you in part by Moby, the global film company that champions great cinema. From iconic directors to emerging authors, there's always something new to discover. If you're looking for something really special, check out Father, Mother, Sister, Brother, the eagerly awaited new film from Jim Jarmish, now streaming on Moby in the US. It follows adult children navigating their relationships with somewhat distant parents and each other. It starts Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayam Bealeck, Charlotte Rampling, Kate Blanchett, Vicky Crips, India Mora, and Lucas Sabat. Moby is a curated streaming service dedicated to elevating great cinema from around the globe. Perfect for lovers of great cinema and for anyone who hasn't discovered how much they love it yet. To stream the best of cinema, you can try Moby free for 30 days at Moby.com slash surge engine. That's mubi.com slash surge engine for a whole month of great cinema for free. Hi, I'm PJ Vote. This is surge engine. This is episode two of our story Colossus. If you haven't heard episode one, please go back and listen. In episode one, we learned about how data centers have evolved in the AI era. How they become more expensive. Less a shared resource intact, more like weapons being hoarded in an arms race. We began the story of one particular data center, Colossus. Elon Musk's ambitious project in the city of Memphis, which would end up causing a huge fight between the people in the city and XAI. Musk has made his career on big promises and risky bets. He's left him in control of one of the world's most popular social media platforms and the world's most valuable car company. But XAI really looks to me like the riskiest bet Elon's made. In part two of our story, we're going to look at why winning this bet is so important to Musk. What he believes the world will look like after he's won the AI race and how far he's financially extended XAI to try to make that bet pay off. Here's your thing. Chapter 6. Collateral damage. Just two years after creating XAI, Elon Musk had proven many of the experts wrong. He was no longer a have-not. With Colossus, he now really did command one of the most powerful data centers on Earth. Colossus was training GROC, Elon's steadily improving chatbot. And this year, XAI absorbed X, Elon's social media platform, and GROC was integrated into X.com. You could begin to see a grander vision emerging. XAI would be the brain running the rest of Elon's operations. As GROC grew more intelligent, it would one day power his optimist robots, support operations at SpaceX, be the driver in self-driving Teslas. That was the dream. But for all of that to happen, GROC would need much more compute. And so, XAI announced it was scaling up yet again, now to a million GPUs. The company made a new purchase, another piece of land in Memphis, this one a warehouse, larger than the oven factory. It would be anointed Colossus too. Elon, of course, was not the only mogul trying to move at hyper speed. OpenAI's Sam Altman announced Stargate, which would also scale up to a million GPUs. Mark Zuckerberg was also talking about his giant supercomputer, Prometheus, followed immediately by an even bigger project, Hyperion. Watching all this, you had to wonder, as the spend got bigger and the energy needs ballooned, did the contestants in this race even know what the finish line was? This September, I got one answer. On stage at a conference, the host of the All-In podcast interviewed Elon. You're scaling up your super cluster in Colossus in Memphis. Can you lost this unit? Yeah, but there was a second one. Yeah, could you go us enough? And Elon was asked the question, at what point in the GPU frenzy might enough be enough? Is there a point of diminishing returns or like how much more compute, if you throw twice as much compute at it, do you get a 10% better model, do you get a 100% better model? Like, is it log-lid? Great question. Elon responds, more GPUs will always mean better AI. Like say, for arguments, say like, hand-x more compute will double the intelligence. Maybe that's that might be a rough rule of thumb. And for him, any increase in intelligence, obviously, is worth the investment. And then he says, I think we'll see intelligence continue to scale all the way up to where, you know, most the power of the sun is honest for compute and then ultimately most the power of the galaxy. Most of the power of the sun and ultimately, most of the power of the galaxy. That phrase stuck with me because it crystallized an essential truth about this AI race. For Elon and maybe for the other CEOs he's racing, there is no finish line. It's not that we reach AGI and then we just get to stop. There is no limit to intelligence, which means there's no limit to the number of GPUs we will need. This partly explains the ravenous hunger driving this AI fight. It's infinite quality. And to feed that hunger, tech companies are doing a lot of borrowing. Take XAI, for instance. Last year, the company raised $12 billion in equity. The kind of money we're used to seeing in startups. This year, XAI raised another $10 billion, but this money was different. Half of it was debt, meaning XAI took out a $5 billion loan. A loan it has to pay back with interest, like a mortgage. I talked to Miles Crouppa, a reporter who covers AI finance for the information and he said that right now there is a lot of people lining up to lend big money for data centers. It's sort of the biggest thing happening on Wall Street, I would say. You see firms like Blackstone basically saying they're all in on data centers. So they're owning data center companies and then they're lending to data center companies. You see banks sort of tripping over themselves to reorganize themselves internally to attract data center companies that want to go out and raise a ton of money. I see. And how does that work? I'm refreshing my memory from the 2008 financial crisis where people who are debt investors want to get in on debt because it's a nice way to get regular payments. Yeah, so that's the promise here is that these debt investors will get a regular payment on their interest and given the fairly risky nature of this, probably a fairly high interest payment. That firm that Miles mentioned, Blackstone, it's one of the major lenders to US data center projects. One of the ways Blackstone makes money is by buying up all sorts of debt, credit card debt, car payments, and the company has latitude to make risky bets because it's private. So it's not regulated the way a bank would be. And the total amount of data center debt in this market is staggering. Analysts at Morgan Stanley say that by 2028, it could exceed $1 trillion. All of it, fueling a construction boom, the likes of which we have not seen in a very long time. So, data center debt, a hot commodity. Eager investors think they can buy a piece of debt, Santa data center like Colossus 2. They can make money off those regular payments, especially if Grock lives up to the hype and begins throwing off revenue. But what about the risk? Remember, XAI is a startup and right now has very little revenue relative to its debt. She would expect might worry all of those investors lining up to buy the debt. What if things go south and the company defaults? But some of the investors that Miles has talked to believe that the loan is actually not that risky. Because no matter what happens, it's backed by a very valuable asset, the GPUs and video GPUs. Talking to people who are doing these deals, they're very quick to point out, you know, we've been doing asset backed finance for a long time. This is just another version of asset backed finance. These chips are highly valuable. A lot of people will want them with that kind of asset. Why can't you lend against that? The argument here is that if in the worst case, XAI defaults, at least the investors will have those chips. They're valuable collateral. But there may be a problem with this collateral. The trouble is that these chips have about a two to three year lifespan before a new generation comes along and you're faced with rapid obsolescence. Paul Kodroski is an investor and a consultant to investors. He's the first person who pointed out to me the speed with which these Nvidia chips become outdated. Remember, all this started with just two Nvidia chips wired together by academics years ago. Those were much older chips, G4s GTX 580s to be precise. You wouldn't use the 580 today, even to play a new video game. Plus forward to the cluster that trained chat GBT, that used a much more advanced chip, probably the A100. Just two years later, Colossus 1 would use an even more advanced chip, the H100. And then a year after Colossus 2, no surprise, will reportedly use the latest chip, the Blackwell. That is a lot of advancement from Nvidia in just a few years. So it's very different from prior waves where we've done this. If you think back to the 19th century in railroads, if I put a bunch of rail in the ground and I didn't use it for five years and then came back, there was no one saying, whoop, that's obsolete. That'll never work, right? It still works. Same thing was true with the fiber optic build out in the 2000 period. So this is very different where you have expensive, fast appreciating chips at the very core of one of the biggest capital spending bubbles in the history of modern economies. There's a reason Paul is talking about these two historic infrastructure bubbles, railroad and fiber. It's because they're the two precedents that AI boosters often point to. I've heard them do it a lot. The founders and investors on podcasts I've listened to, they'll say, even if we're overbuilding data centers, it's okay because we've overbuilt useful infrastructure in the past. We always end up using it. Think of Loudon. How Buddy Riser ultimately used all that fiber in the ground. The thing about that fiber, it's just glass strands in a plastic jacket. It's so resilient that much of what was laid in the ground in the 90s is still functional today. But will that be true of the AI data centers we're building? Will we be able to use them as is many years from now? Here's where we are right now. Billions upon billions of dollars of debt have been taken out. Much of that debt backed by Nvidia chips as collateral. And now everyone is trying to figure out exactly how the value of those chips goes down over time. I asked Anisa Gardesey, the data center reporter. You're at a data center conference right now. You're in Vegas. You're talking to me from my hotel. How big of a topic is this? How big of a question? Is this something people are talking about? This is the main thing that people are here talking about. No one really has an answer, which is I think just a reflection of where we are in this cycle. Some of the projects are getting so big that it's almost hard for people in the industry to really understand what's going on. Miles, the finance reporter, has been experiencing that same degree of uncertainty. He told me he's gotten very different ranges from companies when he asked how long do Nvidia chips hold their value. The answer from one AI cloud company was six years, although that company, CoreWeave, they've borrowed a lot of money to buy chips. You might expect them to say that. Others give a more conservative answer. The major clouds, Google, Amazon, Microsoft are expecting more in the sort of three to five year range, which I mean, three years is pretty different from five and then three years is pretty different from six. Then there's even a startup called Groc with a Q, not to be confused with Elon Musk's Groc with a K. That's a very unfortunate name. Yeah, who's CEO Jonathan Ross is basically saying, it's one to two years, the useful life of these chips is basically as long as they can last until Nvidia comes out with the next best, greatest thing. It's really kind of up in the air, I would say. We reached out to some of the companies making these assumptions and video decline to comment. CoreWeave, the more optimistic of the bunch, told us that their assumptions are grounded in their ability to, quote, re-contract older processors at a high value, meaning even when the chips aren't the latest model, they'll still get used for something. There's a huge demand for compute. Yet, if you zoom out and look at the kind of funding deals that are happening these days, what you notice is that many of them have become more circular, more baroque, as companies try to get these depreciating chips off of their balance sheets. A lot of companies are doing it, OpenAI, Meta, and this year XAI. XAI needed billions of dollars worth of Nvidia chips for Colossus 2, but the company did not directly borrow the money to buy the chips. Instead, a longtime ally of Elon stepped in, Antonio Garcia's who runs a private equity firm. He is raising $20 billion, the majority of which is debt. He's putting it into a separate company set up just for the steal. That company is buying the Nvidia chips and then leasing those chips to XAI. If your head isn't spinning already, Nvidia is one of the investors in the company that has been set up to buy those Nvidia chips. It's all very circular, and Anisa says that these kinds of deals are designed for a very simple purpose to get as many chips as possible as fast as possible. Based on what I can tell from sources in the industry, this whole idea of leasing the chips is a way to unlock more capital and make it easier for investors to lend money for this asset, but that's not an actual solution, that's an accounting trick. Yes, not much is changing besides how things are being accounted for. Chapter 7 Does this make sense? Can this make sense? A bubble almost always has at its core at least one widely shared and flawed assumption. For instance, in the housing bubble of the 2000s, people wrongly believed the houses were being valued accurately and that housing prices would always keep going up. Many smart people created lots of complicated debt instruments so they could profit off those housing prices. Instead, they almost took down the entire banking system and communities everywhere were devastated, including Loudon, including Memphis. With the crash in 2008, regulation was passed to make it harder for banks to make those kinds of risky loans. But these days, those loans are instead being made by very large, very opaque firms like Blackstone. As one long-time finance editor said to me, people are definitely doing stupid stuff in AI right now. Some companies will go bust. But the more important question is not whether there's a tech bubble, but whether it's a debt bubble. Meaning, has all this AI excitement caused people not just to value some stocks too highly, but to actually lend money that won't be repaid? And if so, when that bubble pops, will it affect the world outside of AI? Will it affect the rest of us? Paul Kodroski thinks the answer is yes. It's very, very difficult to avoid being exposed to what's happening because it has found its way into all these different assets ranging from life insurance to private equity, well, to the S&P 500, which is now dominated by largely AI-centric companies to REITs, very conservative, you thought. Real estate income trust, their owning commercial real estate, like apartment buildings and office blocks. Well, over the last four years, data centers have gone from a zero percent share of REIT ETFs to somewhere between 10 and at the high end, I've seen 18 percent of the assets of a REIT. So, weirdly enough, you're making a conservative investment, no different than being a conservative life insurance in policyholder. What do you know you're actually investing in data centers? It's so wild. It's so wild that it's everywhere. No, no, no, it's a terrible analogy to use, but I say it has literally metastasized through the economy. It's very hard to escape. Leaving aside that AI itself can be hugely valuable and useful, technology has mutated into this real estate bubble around these things called data centers, which many of the same features as the stuff that caused the financial crisis, hidden debt, syndicated financing, synthetic instruments where I rolled up the rents from a bunch of different data centers and then secure it as those. All the kinds of stuff that should make your head spin in circles if you pay any attention during the financial crisis are happening again. So that is the bear case from Paul Kodroski. Other folks I've talked to, like Miles Krupa, are much more cautious. Miles says he doesn't know that we're in a debt bubble per se, but certainly believes that there are pockets of bubble. And XAI concerns him. When he looks at XAI, he sees a company that's taken on more debt and more risk than most. I asked him if he could justify all of this from Elon Musk's perspective. I think the simplest explanation is basically we are deep into the biggest technology arms race in the world and Elon Musk sees no option other than getting these chips as fast as he can to build what basically amounts to a digital god that some of the smartest people in tech think has infinite commercial potential. I mean, you kind of have to go through those logical steps to justify the kinds of things they're doing, the links they're going to to try to get their hands on these chips. It's funny I can hear you as a business reporter, Miles, like straighting to explain to me, like the logic of this, you're like, well, you know, the revenue that would come from the digital god obviously would pay for all of these lease agreements. I'm a skeptical business reporter, but I mean, I see the rationale. I see the potential payout, but it really does take a kind of leap of imagination. I think AI in a way that almost no other technology has before it has kind of like captured the imagination of technology leaders and gotten people to do things that they probably wouldn't do otherwise in pursuit of this kind of commercial Nirvana. I don't really know how else to put it. Commercial Nirvana for me is a very helpful phrase. There is something almost religious about all this. Our tech moguls have developed faith. Faith and a vision for tomorrow were intelligence snows no limit, where we will one day harness the power of the sun to feed a machine god that we have created. If you believe that, all this does make sense. But what if you don't? What if you don't buy the vision and one day a billionaire shows up in your city with plans to hastily build a juggernaut? For the break, Memphis versus Colossus. You want to send me to Michael Thompson who bucked the whole A.B. dropped out and testified against them. And you think I'm going to go there and convince him to recant? I thought he has created this illusion of who he is. I was just stunned that I would have a conversation like this with an ex gang leader. I was in the hearing and I thought, oh my goodness, these girls are falling for his bullshit. I think they're going to let this guy out. The world would be a much better place with this man out. It's like a light just kind of pours out of him. And I was determined to help that light get out into the world. Blood memory. A new podcast series from Love and Radio. Search for blood memory wherever you get your podcasts. Chapter 8 Power Circle. So what are you seeing in your two fenders? I mean just zoom in. It just zooms in. So if you want to put it to your... Oh wow, this thing is super... It's just for golf. Yeah, it's a little golf thing. I got to do a little bit of spying on Colossus 1 when I was in Memphis. I was standing outside the fence perimeter with an investigative reporter named Sam Harteman. He works at the Daily Memphian, loves golf, hence the rangefinder, which he's been using this past year when he visits the data center to watch the build out. Yeah, and so I'll count some cars on the parking lot. I'll just see how many people are here. So what we're looking at here is this crane. This crane here is building another substation. So this will be when XAF fully connects to the grid and TBA needs a full-bulb. He's been keeping an eye on this place since before it had anything to do with Elon Musk. He visited back when it was just a factory in the Electrolexia era. The outside still looks the same, he says. A single-story gray block, almost a million square feet. That these days you can see an XAI flag billowing above it all. It's just funny to me because standing here, I'm like, I've been to data centers. To be honest, this doesn't look like a data center. It looks kind of like a dusty old factory. Yeah, it's a factory. We're here and next to an old soybean field, there's a steel factory, a couple hundred yards to our left. This used to actually let this one be phala this year, but this last year was all corn, just to our left. Like, we would have been corn-warven right here. We move our rangefinder to take a look at the most exciting feature of this otherwise unremarkable site, the subject of all the controversy. Right in front of us on the other side of the fence is a cluster of shiny silver smoke stacks, which are right now producing a very loud mechanical roar. The turbines. So those are the turbines, and you can see the one on the right there. At one point, they all look like the one on the right. For the group of Memphians who wanted to shut the closses down, boot Elon Musk out of their beloved city. These turbines would become, maybe, their best shot. Here's what happened. As you know, Elon is trying to get closses up and running at a pace that everybody told him was impossible. You cannot just build a supercomputer from scratch in a few months. But Elon was determined. He'd already raised $6 billion. He poured a big chunk of it into the latest Nvidia chips and other AI hardware. They figure out all the tricky cabling, the water cooling, but the thing that ends up being the hitch is power, electricity. The cluster is ready for training, but the connection to the grid, that substation, is not, and would not be ready for many months to come. Maybe in another scenario, in a world where the race to build a machine god wasn't looming over at all, in a world where billions of dollars were not at stake, XAI might have waited. Instead, the company found a workaround. It brought in dozens of these shiny silver natural gas turbines, essentially mobile generators, the kind that you would use during a natural disaster like Hurricane Katrina. Except standing here, one thing is crystal clear. Calling these things mobile generators is very funny because each one is the size of a house. People can't see, but they're giant things. They're probably 30. They all look like mini factories. Yeah, look at these. Yeah, exactly. Look, stack. I mean, this is essentially a mini power plant, what we're looking at right now. I mean, just to be thought of that way conceptually for people, because I think people, when they think turbines, they think the thing that's connected to your house. So, these turbines are giant. And at one point, there were as many as 35 of them, each one emitting while it ran, an unknown amount of pollutants into the local air. Sam Hartman has done a lot of reporting on these turbines. He says the questions were raised when they were first brought in, about whether they were legal or safe. But the fight around them really got going months later, this January. Local politicians and community members felt that they had not been consulted about this enormous Elon Musk AI project. They were not blown away by the cool cabling, or by GROC, the world's most popular anti-woah chatbot. What they saw were the turbines, and what they wondered about was their emissions. So those concerned Memphians started filling the seats at county government meetings. Many of them from the Boxtown area, Boxtown being the neighborhood in the shadow of colossus. And new at five, the XAI debate is heating up over just how safe the computer company Elon Musk has built in Memphis really is. Some people are not happy about the environmental impact of the facility in South Memphis. A group of Boxtown residents and local organizations are calling out city leaders urging them to take a closer look into what they say is a violation of the law. By April of 2025, XAI had run its quote unquote temporary mobile turbines for almost a full year. The company would need a permanent permit to keep using them past that one year mark. That permit was at the discretion of the county's health department. The health department is now gathering comments from the public on XAI, and will hold a community meeting April 25th to hear from the public and let them know if there is reason to worry. I don't know if there's been a time in American history where the public has had so little faith in the tech moguls, such mistrust of the visionaries. The question hovering in Memphis then, it wasn't, do we trust Elon Musk? The question was, given that many of us don't, do we get a say in what he can do in our town? The public meeting took place in fairly high school. Sam Hartman was there. It was a hot day. It was just Memphis starts to really heat up in about April. It really starts to get cooking. And the people were standing in line for hours to get in because there was a lot of security. Like a tremendous amount of security for a public meeting. They've been a rally outside before. Keep the ball. Keep the ball. Let's march in. Sign up for public comment. Let's show them who we are. Yeah. There he is. There was national media there from all over, I mean from Europe even. I think German news stations were there. Like it was, there was a lot. Why do you think that was? I mean, do you think it's AI? Do you think it's Musk? It's a combination of both, right? It was the richest man in the world. And prominent Trump supporter, you know, unpopular president in this city and you're probably in precincts that voted, you know, 90, 10 for Harris, right? And then you have this narrative of Elon Musk is using illegal turbines to poison people. And so it was a hot button issue. So, if more we get started, the purpose of tonight is to make sure that you are a public comment. This is a public hearing. Elon has gathered in the school auditorium hundreds of people. The head of the county's health department is leading this meeting. She brings on Elon Musk's deputy for the classes project, the closest thing they'll get to having Elon in the room. Representative up from the applicant essay is to Brent Mayo to come and have him do work. I think Brent Mayo, I'm barely on the room by the time Brent Mayo is here. I'm not speaking. You spoke at the beginning of the meeting, you read some talking points. Larger couldn't hear him, because people were just feeling in. Brent Mayo tries to get his talking points out. Like he mentions tax revenue, which this is true, XAI will pay $25 million in taxes in just its first year, 3 million of which are promised to box town and the neighborhood's closest to classes. The room's not interested. What you hear instead is people shouting, do you think we're dumb? And then he left through the side door. And then the people get to speak. It's a mix of politicians, activists, residents. We hear because we demand that the Sherby County Health Department deny XAI's permit for 15 gas turbines that will pollute our community that is always in the room. If we don't protest now and try to do something now, we'll never be done. The argument in this room is that Elon Musk needs to be evicted from Memphis because of all of XAI's air pollution. From one perspective, this doesn't entirely make sense. Memphis is an industrial city with a lot of companies generating emissions. Take FedEx. FedEx operates nearly 400 daily cargo flights out of its hub in Memphis. Plains. Terrible for that atmosphere. But those flights, those emissions, which have been happening for years, they are not causing protests or town meetings. Of course, there is a very big difference. People like FedEx, they understand why package delivery is valuable. The company provides lots of jobs. XAI on the other hand, likely won't bring many jobs to this community. And tax revenue, like a supercomputer, is just a very abstract thing. I think about how differently things had gone in Loudon County. How differently data centers had been received there. And how differently they'd been unfurled. Not overnight, not with the name like a sea monster. What we call a new technology shapes how we understand it. And people in that room, apparently, did not see colossus as a gift. I asked the man who helped summon colossus here, Ted Townsend. AIs knew but data center projects are not. Did XAI somehow air in moving as quickly as it did? What I understand is that other companies like Microsoft, Amazon, Google, that have a lot of experience doing data centers have never used mobile generators in the way that was used in the XAI site. And I've heard people say, well, that's why Microsoft wouldn't have done it this way. That it is in a way a byproduct of how fast XAI was moving and how fast the city allowed it to move. Yeah. I can't speak for other companies and what their timelines are. I know XAI was aggressive. And if they could be aggressive and hit milestones doing so by the letter of the law, then that's what they did. And AI is a race. You know, XAI came into the race late, admittedly. Elon has said that. So they knew that they had to build very quickly. And that's why I think you've seen the variance. And this project versus others across the country. Absolutely. And I think, I mean, it's your first big data center project. It's their first big data center project. I'm curious if you, you're not the boss of Elon Musk. Nobody is. Nobody. But if you were doing it, you are doing it again with classes too. I'm curious, what would you do differently or how would you ask the company to do it differently? At this point, I wouldn't. I think they have built out responsibly. I think that the investments that they've made in our infrastructure and protecting our resources is second to none. I don't see anything that needs to be done differently. So that is Ted Townsend's view. And it seems to match the view of the Memphis government. A few months after that emotional meeting at Fairly High School, XAI got its permit. Colossus would stay, so with the turbines. And so now, here we are pulling up the Colossus too. That's the former warehouse. A huge white. Garrett and I drove with Sam Hartiman to the site of XAI's newer, bigger data center, the one that's scaling up to a million GPUs. It's about 20 minutes south of Colossus 1, right on the border between Tennessee and Mississippi. It's still under construction. There's just like big mounds of dirt and diggers. Yeah, and we'll just turn around up here. Sam brought us here to show us the lesson that Elon Musk and XAI seem to have taken away from their big turbine fight. Although it's probably not the lesson that community would have hoped for. As you can see, more turbines right there, big old stacks of them. Yeah, so turbines. Colossus 2 will use dozens more mobile turbines. But this time, XAI placed them very carefully just on the other side of the state line, about a mile south of Memphis in Mississippi. And so tell me where the state line is. It looks on the map like we're right on top of it. We're on top of it. It's right there. Oh wow, that's Mississippi. That's why. So this road is the dividing line between... The Mississippi is right there, I think. The stakes are in there. We're in Tennessee, but if we drove 10 feet to our left... If we literally threw a baseball at the window, you threw a ball in Mississippi. Simply like the... Great amount of time I won't point. It should have usually said there would be no new mobile turbines in Shelby County. Well, that's easy when DeSoto County, Mississippi is right next door. How convenient. Very convenient. We drive on. Chapter 9. Box Town. The neighborhood is just a short drive from the original Colossus. Colossus 1. On our way there, we pass by the wastewater treatment plant that XAI is building. On our right is a big natural gas plant, and then a sewage treatment plant. And then we take a turn into this shockingly green verdant zone. It's taken us less than 10 minutes to drive from the center of industry to this quiet residential area. This will be boxed down there. Yeah, boxed down there. Those will be the closest houses to XAI. It's more sparse compared to other parts of Memphis we've driven through. A few pockets of houses and then green woods. Yeah, but it doesn't seem like a lot of people live here. The census tract data would show you there are not a lot of people here. About 3,000 people live in Box Town, which is a historically black neighborhood. A century and a half ago, black Americans who'd just been freed from slavery, built homes here out of wood from old railroad cars. There we go. Okay, here. Hello, hello. Perfect. Garrett and I returned to Box Town the next day. We wanted to talk to the people who lived there. Can I just have you say your name? Oh, Parady. P-A-R-A-T-A-D-Y. L-P-R-D-A-F-R-S-N-J-N-R-R-E. Right. That's called me right. Right. It was a Thursday afternoon, pretty quiet. But we walked up to a few people who were just standing outside their homes. Have you been here a long time? I'm on life. Born right over there in the home right over here, so that was in 1961. I've been here a long time. I was raised up down through here. Yeah. Ray Lewis worked as a sanitation worker for 44 years, but he's retired now. When we saw him, he was sitting on his front porch on a chair and just watching truck after truck go by. You just hear the trucks right now, but after a while when they get through the door they don't. If he's so quiet down here, you can't hear a pinball. Do you like that? Yeah, who me? Love it. Love it. Love it. The people I spoke to that day had a lot of pride in box down. It was like a slice of country inside the big city. We're country folks. I hate to lose that sense of peace. Albert was also retired. He used to work for the city's legal department. I talked to him and his brother Clarence in their backyard while their other brother was doing work with a tractor. He'd be lying up and he's old, I just clear an awesome stuff. The lawn is in wonderful shape. I want to say it's a large area, a lot of lawn tape. Keep up. The two of them knew about the XAI project. Albert had been to a community meeting about it, but they had not been involved with the protests. Their feeling was, our quality had been a problem for years around here. This fight felt a little political. The thing that was most on Albert's mind was actually not a data center. It was garbage. We've been dealing with the problems associated with dumping of humongous numbers of tires and all that. How long ago was this the hundreds of tires? What this been months ago. You go right across the track up here and you may still see a big stack pile of tires. We're both on the street just the other day. Somebody dumped there. We asked for cameras, everything here and we're not getting that. The brothers had no idea who was dumping tires and boats in their neighborhood. They'd even found stolen cars left burning in the middle of the street. Albert said he called local officials who told him that they would deal with it, but they didn't. And so the brothers cleaned it themselves with their own tractors. No, they didn't say that. Okay. No, and do they have something to do with the computer? Ray Lewis, on the other hand, the man on the porch, he had a lot more to say about XAI and Elon Musk. Really, truly. I've been hearing a whole lot about Elon Musk. Elon Musk, you know, how many million dollars is being spent in Elon Musk. But see, the front is this. How many, by the input in this here in Memphis, right? I mean, for sake of high, the work with this company. Ray's question, how many people in box town were actually going to get jobs here? Because they just don't go stick it up there and don't hide nobody. Then hide the world you're going to get rid of the crimes. No job, that's what made crimes. You don't even know. Crime is high. But now you're going to throw up a building. You're going to be on a blind neighborhood. And then don't hide anybody on their job. It's just like pouring milk, you know, paper sack with a hole in it. You know what I'm saying? See, you know, and then what I'm saying is just like this. You know, waste makes won't. It's like pouring milk in a paper sack with a hole in it. There are a lot of problems in this world. Even more problems than can be solved by all the supercomputers in our horizon. And the thing about many of our most important problems is that they are not exciting. And yet, they need to be solved by very smart people who are not at board by these mortal scale dilemmas. No one I talked to in box town was awaiting the new machine god. They just hoped when it was all over, there might be some new jobs, less crime. Maybe Colossus 3, in its idle time between finding the meaning of life or locating aliens, could finally just do something about the pile of tires. Okay, so that's all I can say. That's really helpful, sir. Thank you. All right, thank you. Reporter Shruti Pinemennany. She's also Sir Chengeans Editor. Good way! So embarrassing! They're growing up. Won't be long before the thought of a family holiday is just. But with Hilton's staycations all over the UK, we don't need to go far to feel close. And with connecting rooms confirmed when we book, we'll have plenty of space to make the most of every moment. Everyone in the photo! When time away means time together, it matters where you stay. Book now at hilton.com, Hilton for this day. Sir Chengeans is a presentation of Odyssey, created by me, PJ Vote, and Shruti Pinemennany. Gair Graham, especially from Memphis, is our senior producer. Emily Maltaire is our associate producer. Theme, original composition and mixing by Armin Bizarreian, fact checking this week by Mary Mathes. Special thanks this week to Ken Brown, Sam and Margaret Graham, Aissa Fitch, Alex Bloomberg, and the listening group. Our executive producer is Leah Restennis. Thanks to the rest of the team at Odyssey, Rob Morandi, Craig Cox, Eric Donnelly, Colin Gainer, Maureen Curran, Josephina Francis, Kirk Courtney, and Hillary Shot. If you'd like to support our show, get ad free episodes, zero reruns, and give us the financial support to make more ambitious and longer investigations such as this one, which take travel time resources. Please consider signing up for Incognito Mode. You can join Incognito Mode at search engine.show. Please follow and listen to search engine every year podcasts. Thanks for listening. We'll be back soon with a new episode.
