Posts tagged The Memphis Files

#2: Memphis Failed Boxtown Long Before Elon Musk Came To Town

GriftMatrix The Memphis Files 51 Comments

Part 2 of The Memphis File. Boxtown was founded by formerly enslaved people in 1863. By 1975 the city of Memphis was getting sued in federal court for not providing the neighborhood with basic services. By the time xAI showed up, Boxtown was surrounded by a natural gas plant, an oil refinery, a steel mill, and a medical sterilization plant releasing a known carcinogen. Cancer risk was already four times the national average – before xAI. Here are the five real harms every city should worry about when a data center comes to town, and the loophole xAI used to skip every public review.

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#1: The Quiet Door: The Concierge Desk, The NDAs, And Who Found Out Last

GriftMatrix The Memphis Files 25 Comments

By the time the Memphis City Council found out Elon Musk was building the world’s largest supercomputer in their city, the deal was already done. The Greater Memphis Chamber held twelve invitation-only meetings, ran a five-person concierge desk for one company, and made fourteen city employees sign NDAs — including the mayor and the utility CEO. Council member Rhonda Logan said it on the record: ‘We don’t know anything. This is already here and we don’t know anything.’ The NDA isn’t protection. The NDA is the corruption.

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The Memphis File: This Isn’t A Story About AI. It’s A Story About Corruption.

GriftMatrix The Memphis Files 22 Comments

Anthropic isn’t building a second data center in Memphis. They’re renting compute from xAI’s existing supercomputer. So why does that matter? Because watching everyone panic about the wrong thing made me realize: most people are mad about xAI for the wrong reasons. The villains here aren’t billionaires from Pretoria. They’re local. They’re the people who took the meeting, signed the NDAs, and kept their jobs. This is a corruption story, and over the next ten essays I’m going to walk you through every name, every dollar, and every meeting Memphis didn’t get to attend.

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