Imported talent, local pollution: The grim reality of xAI's impact on Memphis

xAI’s Colossus data center (Steve Jones, Flight by Southwings for SELC)

To power its sprawling Colossus supercomputer facility in Memphis, Tennessee, xAI, Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company, has polluted the air of a number of historic Black neighborhoods, which already faced exceptionally high rates of cancer and respiratory diseases.

Residents were supposed to receive something significant in return for allowing the company to operate in the city: an influx of permanent jobs that provide “Silicon Valley wages,” according to local officials backing xAI’s operations in the city.

The Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce, xAI’s leading local advocate, promised that the company would “bring up to 500 quality, high-paying jobs to Memphis in its initial phase.” Brent Taylor, a Republican state senator and vocal xAI supporter, even claimed the company would hire “from economically distressed areas of Memphis” and change the lives “of people who are able to move from SNAP benefits to six-figure wages.”

But a review of publicly identifiable xAI employees and online job postings suggests the company remains far behind its hiring claims and is not on track to achieve its stated job targets in the foreseeable future. Additionally, more than half of the known xAI employees in Memphis were hired from outside the region, raising questions about whether the company is delivering the “transformational” economic impact promised by Memphis Mayor Paul Young.

Neither xAI nor the Chamber has provided concrete updates on Colossus’s employment numbers. xAI did not respond to a request for comment.

Lofty job promises

Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce President Ted Townsend announced in June 2024 that xAI had agreed to build its data center in Memphis following a competition that lasted “less than 90 days.” The Chamber envisioned the facility turning Memphis into a “Digital Delta” that would attract additional tech companies, with xAI leading the charge by creating “high quality jobs.”

Exactly how many jobs xAI planned to bring was not immediately made clear.

In July of that year, The Daily Memphian reported that xAI planned to hire an 80- to 120-member “fiber team,” adding that “with the new hiring plans, the Memphis site could employ up to 320 people.”

By the end of 2024, the company had fallen well short of those goals. CTC Property LLC, the affiliate used by xAI to manage its Colossus supercomputer facility, reported having just 44 participants in its pension plan at the time. (That figure may not reflect Musk’s entire Memphis staff, as the California-headquartered xAI Corp. has a separate pension plan that had 724 active participants at the end of 2024).

Still, Townsend pointed to the 320-employee target in remarks at a Chamber event on December 4, 2024, stating that xAI was “ramping up to about 320 jobs in this first phase” of the data center’s buildout. He also said the jobs would be permanent, rather than temporary construction jobs. The Chamber increased that estimate by December 17, 2024, when its website stated that “xAI will bring over 500 quality, high paying jobs to Memphis in its initial phase with plans to grow more.”

But xAI had only 20 Memphis positions open on its website by early January 2025, according to the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Eleven of the positions were in data center operations, with the remaining jobs in security, human resources, and engineering. Even if xAI intended to hire multiple employees for each position, the postings still offered little indication of a large-scale recruitment drive involving the onboarding of hundreds of workers.

At least one local official who has advocated on behalf of xAI and Musk insisted the company had already hired 300 highly paid workers, including locals whose incomes were previously so meager that they relied on food stamps to make ends meet. “I have toured the facility multiple times, most recently last week,” State Senator Brent Taylor said in June of last year. “They are employing approximately 300 xAI employees and paying Silicon Valley wages. They are hiring from economically distressed areas of Memphis and are changing lives of people who are able to move from SNAP benefits to six-figure wages.”

However, when asked by a local news outlet, Taylor could not name a single xAI employee who had gone from receiving food stamps to a six-figure salary.

The senator also said that xAI was “employing 1,100 independent contractors in perpetuity to continue to build out and maintain the supercomputer,” claiming that “these independent contractors are largely local contractors.”

There is no concrete information to support any of Taylor’s claims. xAI’s website simply states that the company is “creating hundreds of permanent jobs in the greater Memphis community and across Tennessee.”

xAI appears to fall far short of 500-employee promise

Evidence suggests that xAI has hired far fewer than the 500 Memphis employees the Chamber promised. A review of publicly visible LinkedIn profiles and other online sources identified just 99 people who appear to be employed at the company’s Memphis facility. xAI’s website also suggests the company is hiring only dozens of full-time positions in Memphis, not hundreds.

As of January 6, 2026, xAI listed 44 open positions in Memphis, including 25 data center operations positions, five engineering positions, two finance positions, three human resources positions, and three security positions.

The company’s hiring rate appears to have lagged even more in prior months. Last April, xAI had just 28 positions posted on its jobs site, including five security roles and two front desk roles. In December 2024, its jobs website showed 20 Memphis positions, according to The Commercial Appeal. In July 2024, the same month that an unnamed source told The Daily Memphian that the xAI site “could employ up to 320 people,” xAI had just eight positions open in Memphis.

Some of xAI’s advertised positions in Memphis appear to be construction-related, suggesting that the jobs may not be permanent. Titles for the positions include construction supervisor, construction manager, and construction engineer. The available jobs also include a project engineer position for someone with a construction background to serve as the “daily bridge between construction crews and xAI’s goals.”

xAI also appears to pay some of its workers below the average Memphis-area wage. A flyer advertising an xAI hiring event in October stated that the company’s starting rate is $20 an hour. The mean wage in the Memphis area is $27.96, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Most xAI jobs are not going to Memphis locals

LinkedIn data also suggests that most of xAI’s Colossus jobs have not gone to existing residents of the Memphis area, raising questions about how transformative the project has been for the local community.

Memphis officials supportive of xAI have insisted that the company is providing jobs to a notable number of residents. Brent Mayo, the company’s local project leader, also said in 2024 that xAI prefers to hire residents from the city and the broader region, adding that xAI could make Memphis—which is majority Black—the “largest concentration of Black tech talent in the country.”

But among the 99 visible LinkedIn profiles of Colossus employees, at least 53—more than half—are for staffers who joined the company from outside the region. LinkedIn profiles for 43 of the employees indicate they were previously based in either Greater Memphis or Tennessee. Three of the employees’ prior residences are unknown.

Much of xAI’s transplanted workforce appears to have come to Memphis either from Musk companies based elsewhere in the country or from industry giants like Google and Amazon. At least five of the known employees at the Colossus facility previously worked at Microsoft, and four worked at SpaceX facilities in Texas. xAI has also brought in employees from X and Tesla, continuing Musk’s habit of shuffling workers between the different segments of his business empire.

Many of xAI’s known Memphis employees work in administrative and other non-tech positions, while a disproportionate number of xAI’s local hires appear to be serving in security roles, rather than technology jobs.

Out-of-state contractors

xAI has relied on a considerable amount of contract labor to build Colossus, including workers brought in from outside Tennessee. The approach reflects standard data center building practices, which require large numbers of temporary contractors—such as construction crews, fiber specialists, HVAC teams, and other vendors—during the buildout phase. Once the facility becomes operational, most of those workers are no longer needed, and a much smaller team can maintain the site.

Mayo told local news station WREG in August, “Quite a few of the companies that we’ve brought in are contractor-based.” But he insisted that these are long-term contracting jobs for locals, adding, “Elon’s directive to us was to be in a constant state of build from now until eternity.”

“A lot of people cling to this contractor mentality, oh it’s just temporary, oh, they’re not here. Well, our contractors are people from the Memphis region,” Mayo said. The station also reported that “on any given day, [Mayo] says up to 800 people from the Memphis area could be working [at Colossus].”

However, xAI has also relied on out-of-state firms, such as Introl Solutions, a Chicago-based IT company with a national presence, which has brought in technician subcontractors from across the country to work on Colossus. CTC Property sued one of these out-of-state Introl subcontractors, Aleksandr Shulgin of Arlington, Texas, after he breached his employment agreement by taking photos inside the Colossus facility and posting them online.

The lawsuit outlines the vital role that firms like Introl played in the construction of Colossus. “To complete its rapid construction, CTC contracted with vendors, some of which have subcontractors. Introl Solutions LLC (‘Introl’) is such a subcontractor and employs on-site technicians who, for example, sort, label, patch, and lay out the cables that connect the AI components,” it states.

It appears that Introl commonly brings subcontractors from outside of Memphis to work at Colossus. At least two xAI employees are former Introl contractors who came to Memphis after working for the company in Atlanta.

Other job promises fall flat

Townsend has made other xAI-related job promises that have failed to materialize. The Chamber issued a press release in December 2024 stating that xAI’s investment in Memphis would lead to Dell, Nvidia, and Supermicro “establishing operations” in the city. Townsend also announced the news at a Chamber event on December 4, 2024, where he told reporters, “We know that this is going to represent thousands of new high-tech jobs here in the Memphis community.”

The Chamber insisted that “the new projects being announced encompassed major operations that go beyond their existing work with xAI,” according to the Memphis Business Journal.

But Dell refuted the Chamber’s announcement, stating in January of last year that it was not planning to establish new operations in the city. The company’s website continues to list no open positions in Memphis.

There is also no evidence that either Nvidia or Supermicro ever established significant new operations in Memphis. Nvidia’s website does not list Memphis among the 18 cities across the U.S. where it operates, and it does not list open jobs in the city. Although Supermicro told the Memphis Business Journal that it intends to establish local operations, it has yet to announce or launch any meaningful new presence in Memphis.

Data centers typically create few jobs

xAI’s apparent hiring shortfall in Memphis aligns with broader evidence showing that data centers generate relatively few jobs despite their massive size and immense power and water demands.

Microsoft estimates that it hires “about 50 full-time employees and vendors” when a data center building becomes operational and hires another 50 full-time employees and vendors for each subsequent building at the facility. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that a typical large data center requires 1,688 local workers during its initial 18- to-24-month construction phase, but just 157 workers to maintain annual operations.

John Dinsdale, chief analyst at Synergy Research Group, similarly told the Wall Street Journal in February that data centers can employ more than 1,000 people during construction but rarely need more than 100-200 employees once they are operational.

A December 2024 report by the Virginia General Assembly’s Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission found that “a typical 250,000-square-foot data center may have approximately 50 full-time workers (one employee per 5,000 square feet versus one employee per 650 square feet for some distribution centers).”

Colossus is roughly three times the square footage cited in the Virginia report, and it may require more staff than a typical data center, given that xAI calls the facility “the world’s biggest supercomputer.”

But even OpenAI’s one-million-square-foot Stargate AI data center in Abilene, Texas, will need just 100 permanent workers once completed, according to Abilene’s economic development agency.