xAI Colossus 2, Whitehaven

What the ground held

Map: Whitehaven before the Colossus 2 campus

Whitehaven sits southeast of Boxtown across a corridor of 1950s and 1960s subdivisions whose demographic trajectory the Boxtown essay describes in shorter form. Francis White settled the area in 1851, and for more than a century Whitehaven operated as an unincorporated agricultural community in southern Shelby County.¹ Elvis Presley purchased Graceland at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard in 1957, and the house and the surrounding subdivisions became one of the country’s best-known suburban addresses during the decade that followed.¹

The demographic shift that the Boxtown annexation preceded arrived in Whitehaven on a different schedule. Integration of the area’s schools and commercial districts in the late 1960s triggered a sustained wave of white flight that accelerated after the City of Memphis forcibly annexed Whitehaven on January 1, 1970.¹ By the 1990 census the area was majority-Black. The American Community Survey five-year averages that the U.S. Census Bureau released in 2023 report the neighborhood as 91.1 percent Black across a population of approximately 41,400.¹ Household incomes across the Whitehaven census tracts run below the Memphis metropolitan average but above the Boxtown figures the Boxtown essay cites.

The built environment of Whitehaven is closer to a 1960s suburban template than to Boxtown’s century-old freedmen’s-settlement pattern. Single-family ranch houses on quarter-acre lots predominate. The commercial spine runs along Elvis Presley Boulevard from Graceland south to the Mississippi state line. T.O. Fuller State Park, one of the first state parks in the United States open to Black visitors when Tennessee created it in 1938, sits on the southwestern edge of Whitehaven adjoining the Chucalissa Indian Village archaeological site that the University of Memphis has operated since 1956.¹ The park is the most consequential surviving public green space in South Memphis.

Industrial layering in Whitehaven is lighter than in Boxtown but not absent. The retired Allen Fossil Plant sits on the Mississippi River bluff directly west of T.O. Fuller State Park. The Tulane Road corridor along the western edge of Whitehaven, where the Colossus 2 site sits, had held a former tape-manufacturing plant and a former Duke Energy industrial facility before the xAI acquisition.²

What xAI took

Map: The 186-acre Tulane Road campus

On February 27, 2025, a shell entity called CTC Property LLC, subsequently identified in Shelby County property records as an xAI affiliate, purchased approximately 186.13 acres at 5400 Tulane Road in Whitehaven for $79.9 million.² Ownership was transferred in July 2025 to a second xAI affiliate, MZX Tech LLC. The parcel had most recently held a one-million-square-foot industrial building that xAI announced it would repurpose and expand for the second training supercomputer.²

Memphis Light, Gas and Water officials confirmed in public comment that the utility had entered early-stage discussions with xAI regarding up to 1.1 gigawatts of eventual electric demand at the Tulane Road campus.³ The figure, if delivered, would place Colossus 2 among the largest single-customer electric loads ever served by a municipal distribution utility in the United States. Tennessee Valley Authority transmission expansion and a new or expanded substation would be required to deliver the 1.1 gigawatts; the utility has not disclosed the cost of the upgrades or the allocation of those costs between xAI and the general MLGW ratepayer base.

The Boxtown essay documents the MW-to-household translation at the 150-megawatt approved figure and the 2,000-megawatt announced figure at the first campus. At 1,100 megawatts, running at the continuous duty cycle a training supercomputer requires, Colossus 2 would produce annual consumption on the order of 9.6 million megawatt-hours. On the Tennessee residential average of approximately 14,800 kilowatt-hours annually that the Boxtown essay derives from the Energy Information Administration’s published figures, Colossus 2 in full operation would consume as much electricity as approximately 650,000 Tennessee households.⁴ MLGW serves approximately 431,000 electric customers across Shelby County.⁵ The single facility, if delivered at the announced capacity, would consume approximately one and a half times the electricity of the entire residential MLGW base.

Water draw at Colossus 2 has not been publicly disclosed separately from the combined xAI figure. The projected 13 million gallons per day of cooling need that Musk has cited for xAI’s Memphis operation as a whole, to be met in the long term by the pending Colossus Water Recycling Plant pulling treated effluent from T.E. Maxson, presumably applies across both campuses.⁶ The Colossus 2 site does not appear to have a separate water-source infrastructure beyond the MLGW municipal connection, which draws entirely from the Memphis Sand Aquifer.

The Whitehaven campus will also host what xAI has described as the world’s largest deployment of Tesla Megapack batteries for backup power during peak grid loads.³ The Megapack installation would be the first known commercial deployment of the technology at data-center scale and has not been fully characterized in public fire-safety or environmental documentation as of April 2026.

The first physical construction on the Tulane Road site began in the spring of 2025. Aerial imagery the Baxtel data-center tracking service has published shows substantial ground leveling, foundation work on a new four-story building, and the partial clearance of the existing one-million-square-foot structure for retrofit.³ Building permits filed with the Shelby County Construction Code Enforcement office in 2025 and 2026 document the four-story addition and a series of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing upgrades.⁷

In March 2026, xAI acquired a third site in Southaven, Mississippi, approximately eight miles south of the Whitehaven campus across the Mississippi state line. Entergy Mississippi, not MLGW, serves Southaven, which removed the proceeding from Tennessee state jurisdiction and pulled the federal Clean Air Act into play as a multistate regulatory matter.⁸

What the ratepayers paid and the aquifer lost

Map: MLGW territory and Memphis Sand Aquifer, Colossus 2 view

The 1.1-gigawatt figure the Boxtown essay already compared against the MLGW customer base takes on additional weight when Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 are considered together. The two announced-capacity figures, 2,000 megawatts at Colossus and 1,100 megawatts at Colossus 2, sum to 3,100 megawatts. On the Tennessee household consumption ratio the Boxtown essay derives, 3,100 megawatts of continuous operation would produce annual consumption equivalent to roughly 1.8 million Tennessee households, or roughly four times the MLGW electric-customer base.

The disclosed approved capacity across both campuses as of April 2026 is 150 megawatts of onsite gas turbines at Colossus 1 and a pending TVA-MLGW allocation at Colossus 2. Neither the utility, TVA, nor the Tennessee Public Utility Commission has publicly reconciled the gap between disclosed approved capacity and announced capacity. The Southern Environmental Law Center has requested, in filings across 2025 and 2026, that the commission conduct a rate case on the transmission and generation investments that would be required to serve the announced capacity, and that the resulting cost allocation be disclosed to the general MLGW ratepayer base before any long-term contract is executed.⁹ The requests remain pending.

Water consumption at Colossus 2, if the campus comes online at the 1.1-gigawatt figure, would be expected to scale with the GPU population roughly in line with the one-million-gallon-per-day Colossus 1 baseline. At 350,000 GPUs across the Whitehaven site, compared with approximately 200,000 at Boxtown, a water-draw figure on the order of 1.5 million to 2 million gallons per day is consistent with published cooling-load ratios.³ No campus-specific water figure has been disclosed. Protect Our Aquifer has requested campus-specific metering in every MLGW proceeding on the matter.

The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation has not conducted a cumulative-impact analysis across the Boxtown and Whitehaven campuses, the Valero refinery, the Allen Fossil ash ponds, the T.E. Maxson wastewater facility, and the pending Southaven expansion. Memphis Community Against Pollution, Young, Gifted and Green, the NAACP, and the Southern Environmental Law Center have requested cumulative-impact analysis in every filing.⁹ The requests remain pending.

Who fought back

Map: Whitehaven coalition and the state-line proceeding

The coalition that Memphis Community Against Pollution built in Boxtown carried directly into Whitehaven. KeShaun Pearson, LaTricea Adams, and the attorneys at the Southern Environmental Law Center treated the two campuses as one regulatory target from the first public announcement of the Tulane Road acquisition in February 2025. The Boxtown essay documents the plaintiff stack and the coalition template; the Whitehaven record extends the same structure without substantive modification.

The specific Whitehaven-level organizing has been carried by newer participants. The NAACP Memphis branch, which had joined the Boxtown administrative appeal as a co-appellant, expanded its involvement in 2025 to include Whitehaven-specific public-comment organizing through the branch’s environmental-justice committee. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s national office, working with the Memphis branch and with Mississippi state conferences in Jackson and Biloxi, filed the February 2026 federal Clean Air Act notice concerning the Southaven expansion, which named xAI, MLGW, TVA, Entergy Mississippi, and the Tennessee and Mississippi state environmental agencies as potential defendants.¹⁰

Alex Rozier, the environmental reporter at Mississippi Today, carried the Mississippi-side investigative work that parallels Carrington Tatum’s Tennessee-side work at MLK50. His April 15, 2026 reporting on the Southaven federal notice and on Entergy Mississippi’s simultaneous rate case reached the same Tennessee Lookout cross-state coverage that the March 2026 state-line feature had opened.¹¹ The press spine the Boxtown essay describes, MLK50 at the Memphis center and Mississippi Today and Tennessee Lookout at the regional ring, has held across the Colossus 2 fight.

Memphis Community Against Pollution, Young, Gifted and Green, and the Sierra Club Tennessee Chapter have run weekly public-comment and canvassing sessions in Whitehaven from mid-2025 forward. The weekly sessions have not yet produced the concentrated public-hearing turnout that the Boxtown permit fight reached in 2024 and 2025; the Shelby County Health Department has not yet held a formal permit hearing on Colossus 2 specifically, because the MLGW and TVA proceedings that would precede such a hearing are still in their early stages. The coalition is organizing before the formal administrative window opens, which the Boxtown lesson established as the decisive timing.¹²

Graceland and the companies that operate the Elvis Presley Enterprises properties have not joined the coalition. The economic dependence of Whitehaven on Graceland tourism, which draws roughly 650,000 visitors per year to Elvis Presley Boulevard, has produced a distinct political pressure on the neighborhood’s organizing that Boxtown does not face.¹ Coalition partners have described the Graceland complex’s silence as a consequential limitation on the available coalition footprint.

What the atlas’s historical cases offer

Map: Historical parallels for Whitehaven

The Boxtown essay in this atlas sets the primary parallels to Overtown and Black Bottom. The Whitehaven record draws additional weight from two further atlas cases.

The Rondo essay documents the construction of Interstate 94 through St. Paul’s Black commercial core between 1956 and 1968. The clearance was the first destruction; a second, quieter destruction followed across the subsequent three decades as property values, insurance availability, and bank lending withdrew from the blocks adjacent to the freeway. The Whitehaven case threatens a second displacement of the same kind through noise, light, and the below-market pressure that hyperscale neighbors produce on surrounding single-family tracts. The Rondo lesson, that the second displacement is as consequential as the first and requires community organizing that outlasts the immediate destruction, applies directly.

The Fillmore essay documents how the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency executed two formally separate clearance phases, A-1 in 1956 and A-2 in 1964, across a decade in which the Western Addition Community Organization built a cross-phase coalition that carried institutional memory from one phase into the next. MCAP and Young, Gifted and Green are now doing the same cross-campus work in South Memphis, treating Colossus and Colossus 2 as two phases of a single project rather than as two separate fights. The Fillmore lesson, that the second phase of a two-phase destruction is the moment at which cross-phase coalitions either hold the institutional memory or lose it, applies directly.

The transferable point is that two-campus destructions produce two organizing opportunities and two record-making moments. The coalition that won Byhalia Connection in 2021 is now documenting the Colossus and Colossus 2 campuses on the record for the subsequent remedy negotiation, whenever it comes. The atlas treats the documentation as the work that survives, and the coalition’s persistence across both campuses is the work that makes the documentation possible.

What present organizers should borrow

The Colossus 2 record adds two specific tools to the Boxtown playbook the Boxtown essay already describes.

The first tool is the multistate proceeding. The February 2026 NAACP Clean Air Act notice named xAI, MLGW, TVA, Entergy Mississippi, and the Tennessee and Mississippi state environmental agencies as potential defendants, which forced the proceeding out of single-state regulatory jurisdiction and into federal court. The multistate approach had not been a feature of the Boxtown fight, because the Boxtown campus sits entirely within Tennessee and within MLGW’s service territory. Any community now facing a hyperscale siting that straddles state lines, or that sits in one state but draws water or power across a state line, can adopt the multistate notice structure.

The second tool is the cross-phase coalition. Memphis Community Against Pollution treated Colossus and Colossus 2 as one target from the first public announcement of the Tulane Road acquisition. The coalition did not wait for separate local fights to emerge at each campus. Any community now facing a multicampus data-center operator, or a multi-phase transmission corridor, or a multi-site waste disposal siting, can adopt the cross-phase structure from the first public announcement of any campus in the sequence.

The Colossus 2 record is still being written. The campus is not yet in service as of April 2026. The MLGW rate case that would disclose the ratepayer cost of the announced 1.1-gigawatt allocation has not been formally opened. The coalition is organizing into a window that will close at some future administrative milestone. The atlas records what the coalition is doing now, so that the record exists for the milestone whenever it arrives.

The destruction of Whitehaven’s residential quiet and the pressure on its property values is not the categorical destruction that the 1950s clearance projects worked on Boxtown’s freedmen’s-settlement peers. The destruction is, by the Rondo lesson, the second-order destruction that follows large infrastructure into a neighborhood, and by the Fillmore lesson, the second phase of a two-phase project that the Electrolux-site campus opened. The resistance, by the Cooper Square Committee and Black Bottom Archives lessons the atlas has already recorded, is the documentation that grounds every subsequent claim. Memphis Community Against Pollution and Young, Gifted and Green are building that documentation now.

Footnotes

1. “Whitehaven, Memphis,” Wikipedia, last modified 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whitehaven,_Memphis. Cited for Francis White’s 1851 settlement, the 1957 Graceland purchase, the January 1, 1970 forced annexation, the 91.1 percent Black population figure from the 2023 ACS release, the approximately 41,400 population total, the T.O. Fuller State Park 1938 opening, and the Chucalissa Indian Village 1956 date. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶

2. DataCenterDynamics, “Elon Musk’s xAI buys 1 million sq ft site for second Memphis data center,” 2025. https://www.datacenterdynamics.com/en/news/elon-musks-xai-buys-one-million-sq-ft-site-for-second-memphis-data-center/. Cited for the February 27, 2025 CTC Property LLC acquisition, the 186.13-acre parcel size, the $79.9 million purchase price, the July 2025 transfer to MZX Tech LLC, and the 5400 Tulane Road address. ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. SemiAnalysis, “xAI’s Colossus 2: First Gigawatt Datacenter In The World, Unique RL Methodology, Capital Raise,” 2025. https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/xais-colossus-2-first-gigawatt-datacenter. Cited for the up-to-1.1-gigawatt MLGW discussion, the approximately 350,000 GPU projected population, the Tesla Megapack backup-battery deployment, and the construction-progress documentation through 2025. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

4. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Frequently Asked Questions: How much electricity does an American home use?” 2024. https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=97&t=3. Cited for the residential consumption ratio the Boxtown essay derives in detail and extended to the 1.1-gigawatt Colossus 2 figure. ↩

5. Memphis Light, Gas and Water, “About MLGW,” 2024. https://www.mlgw.com/about. Cited for the approximately 431,000 electric-customer count against which the Colossus 2 announced load is compared. ↩

6. Fox 13 Memphis, “Elon Musk says xAI water recycling project on hold until Colossus 2 complete,” 2025. https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-memphis/xai-puts-water-recycling-project-on-hold-drawing-concerns/. Cited for the 13-million-gallon-per-day cooling projection that applies across both campuses and the Colossus Water Recycling Plant pause schedule. ↩

7. WREG Memphis, “xAI files permit for four-story building in Whitehaven,” 2025. https://wreg.com/news/local/xai-memphis/xai-files-permit-for-four-story-building-in-whitehaven/. Cited for the 2025 and 2026 Shelby County Construction Code Enforcement permit filings on the Tulane Road campus. ↩

8. Mississippi Independent, “Mississippi’s data center boom and the cost to the grid,” 2025 to 2026 reporting series. https://msindy.org/p/mississippis-data-center-boom-and. Cited for the Southaven, Mississippi context and the Entergy Mississippi rate implications of the cross-state xAI expansion. ↩

9. Southern Environmental Law Center, “Resistance Against Elon Musk’s xAI Facility in South Memphis Gets Stronger,” 2025. https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-facility-in-south-memphis-gets-stronger/. Cited for the rate-case requests across 2025 and 2026 and the cumulative-impact analysis requests that include both Boxtown and Whitehaven. ↩ ↩²

10. Alex Rozier, “Data center turbines come to Southaven,” Mississippi Today, April 15, 2026. https://mississippitoday.org/2026/04/15/data-center-turbines-southaven/. Cited for the February 2026 NAACP federal Clean Air Act notice that named xAI, MLGW, TVA, and Entergy Mississippi. ↩

11. Tennessee Lookout, “A battle over data centers heats up along the Mississippi-Tennessee state line,” March 18, 2026. https://tennesseelookout.com/2026/03/18/a-battle-over-data-centers-heats-up-along-the-mississippi-tennessee-state-line/. Cited for the March 2026 cross-state reporting that preceded the April federal notice. ↩

12. Memphis Community Against Pollution, “Campaigns,” organizational campaign archive. https://www.memphiscap.org/mcapcampaigns/blog-post-title-three-4frah. Cited for the weekly Whitehaven public-comment and canvassing program and the cross-campus coalition structure. ↩