A company called 5C MEM01 Inc. has filed a permit for a $575 million data center expansion in Memphis, on a site between two neighborhoods where roughly eight in 10 residents are Black. The city still has no data center rules to hold it to.
The site is a former retail headquarters of 1.1 million square feet near Memphis International Airport, with Oakhaven to the west and Capleville to the east, according to Word In Black. The permit was filed Oct. 5. The facility would start at about 20 megawatts and could grow to 84 megawatts within six months. Brad Nimri, 5C’s chief revenue officer, has said the expansion would use fuel-cell technology instead of relying only on Memphis Light, Gas and Water. The fuel, the emissions and the safeguards have not been disclosed.
Black Memphians have seen this before. Elon Musk’s xAI, now part of SpaceXAI, has built multiple data centers in Memphis and Southaven, Mississippi since 2024, powered by a methane gas turbine plant. The NAACP sued under the Clean Air Act over the unpermitted turbines. Last month a federal judge in Mississippi refused the Trump administration’s request to dismiss that case, even though the Justice Department had sided with xAI. Mother Jones reported that Boxtown, the Black neighborhood beside the xAI site, faces a cancer risk from air pollution four times the national average and leads Tennessee in emergency room visits for asthma. Boxtown was founded by formerly enslaved people and went without basic services such as water, sewage and electricity until as late as 1975.
The City Council had the chance to slow things down. On Oct. 20 it voted 6 to 6 on a longer moratorium on new data centers, and the measure failed. Members then passed a 135-day pause, with a substitute ordinance that council members received with little notice. The pause is meant to give the city time to write land-use standards. Mayor Paul Young has ordered a separate 90-day impact study.
Hundreds of residents came to that meeting. Afterward, KeShaun Pearson, executive director of Memphis Community Against Pollution, said: “It’s as if the people who have been elected to protect us and to stand up to corporations and be that representative have just completely abdicated that responsibility.”
Three competing proposals to regulate where data centers can go and how they are permitted were scheduled for final votes Tuesday, according to Word In Black. We could not confirm the outcome before publication.
The argument for the expansion is jobs and investment, and Memphis leaders have courted both. But the city has already seen what happens when the investment arrives first and the rules come after: Black neighborhoods living beside the exhaust, and residents turning to federal court because local government would not act. A permit that is already on file should not be decided before the standards are written. Oakhaven and Capleville should get the emissions numbers, the fuel source and a public hearing before the city says yes.
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