Justin Pearson Is Taking On Elon Musk's Ai Empire

MEMPHIS, Tennessee — When Justin Pearson sits at his desk, he looks at a polluted orange sky. It’s the backdrop of a haunting painting that hangs opposite an American flag in his home office. In the foreground, a figure wears a gas mask while reading the Bible and sitting on a stack of books that include George Orwell’s 1984 and W.E.B. Dubois’ The Souls of Black Folk.

The painting tells the unseen story of this South Memphis neighborhood, with its windy roads dotted by modest, mostly one-story homes: Westwood is sandwiched between two of what have been Memphis’ biggest polluters, both of which are owned by the richest man in the world.

A 10 minute drive to the northwest is Elon Musk’s Colossus 1 data center. A 15 minute drive to the southeast is Colossus 2 and the army of 69 methane gas turbines located just over the state line in Mississippi that currently power the supercomputing hub — most without any of the pollution controls typically required by federal rules. Multiple environmental groups who are now suing xAI have estimated that the machines could emit more than 2,500 tons of smog-forming pollution annually into an area that already leads Tennessee in rates of emergency room visitsfor asthma.

Generative artificial intelligence wasn’t even widely publicly available back in 2021 when Pearson bought the painting. At the time, he was a community organizer hot off his first victory rallying locals against a crude oil pipeline that threatened to bisect Memphis’ underground drinking water source. The painting reminded him of what had been at stake in that fight, and how Black American history and the Good Book are balms for every struggle.

Now a Democratic representative to the state legislature campaigning to represent Tennessee’s Ninth Congressional District, Pearson says he fears the dystopian future of the painting “isn’t as far off as it seemed.”

“AI is controlled by people,” Pearson tells POLITICO Magazine, sitting in his home office in July. “Data centers are built by people. And those people and how they exist and operate in the world are a threat to humanity.”

XAI’s Memphis-area data centers are two of thousands that have been built across the country in just the past few years in support of the nation’s burgeoning artificial intelligence industry. Four of the nation’s biggest technology companies are projected to spend some $670 billion this year alone building more facilities. It’s all part of a race to develop a technology that the CEOs of some of those same companies have said poses a “risk of extinction” to humans if it isn’t developed by the right people in America. But increasingly, Americans are less worried about a potential future threat from AI than the harm they say data centers are already causing their communities — sometimes right next door to their homes. Concerns about air pollution and water use top the reasons that seven out of 10 Americans now say they opposed the facilities coming to their area, according to a March Gallup Poll.

XAI did not respond to requests for comment. But the company announced publicly Thursday it has reached an agreement with the State of Mississippi to remove the turbines that don’t have a Clean Air Act permit over the next year and to “ensure that all SpaceXAI mobile turbines are equipped with advanced emission control technologies.”

“We build our facilities rapidly while upholding the highest standards of operational responsibility, environmental stewardship, and community partnership,” the company writes. “SpaceXAI is committed to powering its supercomputers in ways that both reduce costs of energy for the American people and minimize the impact on surrounding communities.”

In just a few years, AI has been woven into nearly every facet of American society and the economy, including through internet searches, customer service chatbots and healthcare diagnostics — all of which need data centers to operate. Even so, local officials in states across the country, from Oklahoma to California and Michigan have faced recall petitions after supporting controversial projects. But those in favor of the data centers say the facilities are both necessary to solidify the nation’s geopolitical prowess and that the facilities can benefit local communities through increased tax revenue. President Donald Trump echoed that perspective earlier this month when he told potential data center opponents, “You can’t fight it, you have to go with it…. If we don’t do this we are going to be left behind. You have some communities that really want the data centers and frankly those are the smart communities.”

The nascent pushback against data centers is reminiscent of the Luddites of 19th century Britain. Though today the term is often used as a slur for someone who eschews new technology and progress, the Luddite movement was actually a working class rebellion opposing how factory technology of the Industrial Revolution was being used to reduce wages, take away skilled work and degrade air quality. Luddites were hugely popular and memorialized in poems and songs at the height of their protests, when they famously smashed weaving machines.

“Right now, there are a lot of people who look at data centers and see it as the few benefiting at the expense of the many. You could not have a more Luddite movement,” says Brian Merchant, a tech journalist whose 2023 book, Blood in the Machine, examined the Luddites as “the origins of the rebellion against big tech.”

There is now something of what could be called a “New Luddite” movement sweeping Congress and campaign trails across the country, with mostly Democratic pols staking their seats on an anti-data center message. Pearson is one of the crusade’s faces. His is not the most prominent voice calling for a moratorium on data center construction — that distinction likely falls to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York), who has introduced legislation for an indefinite pause with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt). Nor is his campaign’s success guaranteed in his Aug. 6 primary or the subsequent Nov. 3 general election — though there is virtually no polling in the race, his chances became tougher after Tennessee Republicans redrew the lines of District 9 this May to break up the state’s only majority Black and Democratic district and help Republicans retain control of the House.

But Pearson says he’s not afraid of a fight, particularly when it comes to battling corporate interests that he says have harmed his community. He’s been living beside data centers and fighting them long before national calls to rein in the industry. Rather than tapping into a pre-existing movement, Pearson is a conduit of it, elevating his community’s voices to push elected officials to action. Today, two years into the battle, when he calls the campaign “the fight for our lives,” he is speaking in literal terms about his own neighbors and his family members who say their respiratory conditions have seemingly been exacerbated by the facilities down the road.

That fighting spirit has earned Pearson some enemies. He has been called unnecessarily combative and disruptive by Republican state legislators. Republican House Speaker Cameron Sexton stripped all the chamber’s Democrats of their committee assignments following the redistricting vote this May, accusing them of “disrupting the legislative process and creating disorder” for behavior like locking arms on the House floor and interrupting other speakers. Pearson in particular has been criticized for cursing at a state trooper during the protest as his brother, KeShaun, was being forcibly removed from the viewer’s gallery and arrested for disrupting the proceedings and booked on suspicion of disturbing an official meeting. (According to KeShaun, the charges were dropped the same day.)

Scott Golden, chair of the Tennessee Republican Party, says Pearson’s “breaking the rules of the House constantly” by protesting redistricting and “disrespect for law enforcement” could become a centerpoint of the general election should Pearson win the primary. While data centers may be an issue for some voters, Golden questioned whether Pearson’s call for a moratorium was purely out of concern for his constituents.

“The people of middle Tennessee are going to see this as, ‘How do I get in front of the camera or pull stunts on the legislature floor?’” Golden says. “If he’s interested in zoning, perhaps he should run for city council.”

Yet the deluge of data centers popping up simultaneously across the country makes Pearson a voice of the New Luddite moment.

“He is in the eye of that storm,” says Nicol Turner Lee, director of the Center for Technology and Innovation at the Brookings Institution, who has been monitoring opposition to data centers.

“A lot of people feel like their local governments gave the key to their homes to someone who is already in there rearranging the furniture, and Pearson was experiencing that himself.”

Today, the anti-technology rebellion targets data centers. In the early 1800’s, it was the spinning jenny, the wide frame, the gig mill and the power loom that one after another changed fabric weaving from a skilled handicraft done by artisans mostly in their own homes, to work completed by dangerous machines, overseen by people clocking in to work at factory jobs for less wages than before.

Named after a likely-mythical fabric weaver from Nottingham, Ned Ludd, the Luddite movement began peacefully with protest campaigns and letters to newspapers. But the Luddites made little headway. Unions were illegal in the United Kingdom, which did not yet have truly representative democracy. So, in 1811, Luddites began identifying specific textile barons whose workers faced particularly poor conditions — and smashed their machines.

“It wasn’t a backlash against technology, it was a backlash against exploitation,” says Miriam Cherry, faculty director at the Center for Labor and Employment Law at St. Johns University School of Law.

The hammer-wielding workers were celebrated in poems by Lord George Byron who spoke in favor of the movement in parliament and wrote, “Down with all kings but King Ludd!” But after one deadly riot in 1812, where four Luddites were shot by employees of a factory owner who was later killed, the British government sent 14,000 troops to Nottingham to restore order. Parliament made breaking machines a criminal act punishable by death, and after trials where prosecutors painted the movement as a crew of progress-hating vandals, two dozen Luddites were hanged.

Data center opponents aren’t smashing computer chips today, but Merchant sees parallels between the original movement and modern calls for regulations on data centers and artificial intelligence.

“The Luddites of today aren’t just opposing technology for technology’s sake, they are looking at what the technology is doing on the ground and opposing it when they see that it is what those of the industrial revolution would have called ‘hurtful to the commonality,’” Merchant says.

That description is one Pearson would identify with.

Pearson ran for the state legislature three years ago, after beating off developers of the Byhalia Connection oil pipeline who sought to route their 44-mile project through the backyards of Black homeowners rather than alternate routes with preexisting easements. One pipeline contractor explained the choice of the neighborhood was “basically,a point of least resistance.” Valero Energy Corp. and Plains All American Pipeline LP later disavowed that comment, saying the contractor who made it should have said the companies picked a path with the “least community impacts.”

Once in office, Pearson was almost immediately expelled as one of the “Tennessee Three,” Democrats who had joined a protest for gun control at the state capital in the aftermath of a shooting at a Nashville-area school that killed three 9-year-olds. That incident brought him national recognition, and voters sent him right back to the state house in August 2023 — just four months after he was expelled and just in time for him to use his position to battle xAI.

The son of a preacher and an educator, Pearson, 31, is a captivating speaker who often pounds his fist in the air or stomps his feet, as if giving a sermon rather than a stump speech. He adeptly weaves between traditional progressive policies, like healthcare for all and raising the minimum wage, and those that are unique to this moment in history, like redistricting and xAI.

He frames both as part of the “tyranny” he has witnessed “firsthand,” often closing with a rousing a call-and-response that reimagines the Constitution’s preamble to include, “We the people who will not bow down, who will not quit, who will not break under the weight of billionaire control.”

Pearson won’t exactly claim the term “Luddite,” but he acknowledges some “strong similarities.”

“I think people should study what the Luddites were actually doing,” he says. “They saw what was being created was going to have severe and significant disruption on the social fabric of society, and that is why they were destroying the technology, the ‘improvement,’ the ‘progress.’”

Pearson claims his own community hasn’t seen much progress from data centers — quite the opposite. “What I am witnessing is a computer being given more care and concern than a human by elected officials, by corporations, by leadership and by the United States federal government,” he says.

“And that is wrong and it should terrify people, that a data center is being protected more than the people who live near it.”

If the modern Luddite movement has an epicenter, it’s in South Memphis’ 38109 zip code.

XAI’s two facilities here are notorious among data center opponents because the corporation has made a habit of powering its supercomputers with massive gas-burning turbines without equipping them with pollution controls typically required by the Clean Air Act.

Public health groups have long recognized that the air in this corner of Memphis, tucked between the Mississippi River and state line, is unsafe. Even before xAI came to town, there were more than 17 industrial facilities that released enough toxic pollution to require registration with EPA’s Toxics Release Inventory. Many of those polluters were built, alongside Colossus 1, in an industrial park zoned on former plantation lands. The park abuts neighborhoods founded by formerly enslaved people whose residents are still 90 percent Blackwith a median household income of $36,000.

When xAI came to town, it was the result of a concentrated recruitment effort by officials at Memphis’ electric utility and economic development organization. Both Memphis Light Gas and Water and the Greater Memphis Chamber signed nondisclosure agreements as part of those negotiations but readily celebrated that, by bringing its own gas turbines to the site, the data center didn’t have to rely on the area’s already over-taxed electric grid for power.

It was only after Pearson and local environmental groups, including the one he co-founded with his brother KeShaun, spent months pushing for answers — and flying heat-sensing cameras over the facility— that its pollution was disclosed. Comparing photos of the turbines to manufacturers spec sheets, the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center calculated that the turbines could spew smog-forming nitrogen oxides at an estimated 1,200 to 2,000 tons a year, far more than the gas-fired power plant across the street or oil refinery down the road. XAI argued that because the machines were placed on wheels and can easily be moved they fell under less-stringent rules for “temporary” turbinesthat require no filters for pollution during their first year of operation.

At the time, local officials, including the city’s Democratic mayor and Republican state lawmakers remained supportive of the facility. Brent Taylor, a Republican state senator now running for the 9th Congressional District seat, said in a 2025 interview with The Tennessee Holler that the facility was a “great asset for Memphis,” citing the company’s employing some 300 people and paying “Silicon Valley wages.”

Taylor did not respond to interview requests from POLITICO Magazine, but in the 2025 interview with The Tennessee Holler, he said he understood the “concerns of the community relative to the environmental issues” and that worries about pollution “predate xAI’s arrival in Memphis and the efforts to address them thus far seem to be misguided.”

“To hear the critics of the facility, you would think they plopped the xAI facility in the middle of a neighborhood,” he said at the time. “The way I would address the concerns is not to attempt to close xAI or browbeat them to leave Memphis, but I would engage with them and local government to enter into conversations about potential buyout of nearby homes."

Ultimately, Colossus 1 waspowered by 35 massive turbinesfor nearly a year, before the company sought a Clean Air Act permit for the machines that would require it to install pollution control technologies. The resulting permit for just 15 turbines placed limits on harmful pollutants like nitrogen oxides, which form smog, and soot. But air quality monitors have recorded that soot levels remain high in surrounding neighborhoods.

Almost as soon as xAI received the permit for Colossus 1 in 2025, the company began construction of Colossus 2, which sits within a residential area in the same zip code.

XAI sought and received a permit for 41 turbines to power Colossus 2, but the machines, which will be located just across the state line in Mississippi, are not all operating yet. Even with required pollution controls, the permit allows those 41 approved turbines to release nearly 20 tons of fine particulate pollution, or soot, annually, and more than 417 tons per year of nitrogen oxides. Those emissions, in turn, could result in $30 to $44 million in health-related damages, largely due to asthma and heart attacks, according to an analysis from EmPower Analytics Group, an independent firm that quantifies health impacts of data centers and energy infrastructure. The analysis found Pearson’s Westwood neighborhood will see some of the highest pollution increases.

In the meantime, xAI has been powering Colossus 2 with 69 additional unpermitted turbines, most of which have no pollution controls installed. In legal documents, the company has repeated the same arguments that the turbines are “temporary”and don’t require permits for operating less than a year.

XAI’s announcement this week that it will remove the turbines beginning “as early as” this month through July 2027, means the transfer of most of those turbines coincides with their anniversary of being brought on site, when xAI has said it would have to move them regardless. Thirteen turbines will remain onsite beyond the one-year mark, according to the company’s agreement with regulators.

The company now says it will equip the turbines with pollution control technology to limit smog-forming nitrogen oxides “and reduce environmental impacts.” It also claims that “current monitoring shows that local air quality continues to meet or exceed EPA standards,” though the company did not respond to requests to share the monitoring.

“We care deeply about being good neighbors,” xAI says in its statement.

XAI installed the first turbines last August and continued bringing new unpermitted turbines to Southaven Mississippi even after environmental groups and the NAACP asked a federal judgeto halt use of unpermitted turbines in April, including as recently as July. The Department of Justice intervened on xAI’s behalf arguing the machines must continue operating in the name of national security: The U.S. military relied on the data center powering Grok during the American attack on Iran known as Operation Epic Fury. The Trump administration is also arguing that the federal government has the right to quash any Clean Air Act lawsuits brought by citizens against polluters, a move veteran environmental lawyers say could rewrite how pollution enforcement law has worked for decades.

Because xAI didn’t wait to check bureaucratic boxes before powering up its supercomputers, it has been able to build its facilities at lightning speed. SpaceX touts that fact in financial filings. According to initial public offering forms filed in May, the first computing “cluster” of Colossus 1 came online in just 122 days, while the first cluster in Colossus 2 was online within 91.

“We believe speed is a competitive advantage,” SpaceX writes in its $2.1 trillion valuation.

That’s similar to what then-Chamber director Ted Townsend said last year when asked why his group has been supportive of xAI despite community anger over the turbines. (Chamber spokesperson Julian Cross declined to provide a representative to interview for this story but said Townsend’s comments from last May “still stand.”)

XAI, Townsend said at the time, had followed the advice it received from consultants and local health authorities. Using the turbines was necessary, Townsend said, because, “The AI race is just that: It’s a race.”

Technology companies aren’t just racing each other. Foreign policy and national security hawks also say supporting Big Tech’s aspirations is important to ensure artificial intelligence models remain in American hands. One risk of preventing data centers from being built in the United States is China developing better AI models faster, says Bill Drexel, a Hudson Institute senior fellow who studies international AI competition.

“The question hanging in the balance” when data center moratoriums are discussed, he says, is “whether this technology is led by an imperfect democracy or an authoritarian regime.”

Or as Katie Miller, former xAI spokesperson, posted on X in July: “Data centers are national security.”

The AI race is personal for the Pearsons. Their 21-year old cousin Ra’Kelle Miller, a nursing student whose grandmother died of an asthma attack before she was born, has had asthma her whole life. But Miller says it got noticeably worse after she moved back home from college out of state. She has had more frequent asthma attacks this past year and now uses a breathing machine at home, she says. “The only thing that has changed since I left was xAI,” she adds, knocking on doors for Pearson with KeShaun on a 110-degree Saturday morning.

KeShaun, too, is a leading New Luddite voice in his own right. Since national news of the data centers’ turbines broke, he has traveled to other Southern states in support of local moratoriums or speaking out against proposed projects.

“My philosophy is that if Jeff Bezos and Sam Altman are going to travel across the country to talk about how helpful data centers are, I’m going to take the same approach telling communities exactly how dangerous these projects are and equipping them with what we have learned so they can fight back,” says KeShaun, who is the executive director of Memphis Community Against Pollution, the group he and Pearson founded to fight the pipeline six years ago.

When a trio of progressive Congresswomen, including Ocasio-Cortez, arrive in Memphis for a mid-July rally to kick off early voting, Pearson and KeShaun use the occasion to bring Ocasio-Cortez, Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Massachusetts) and Rep Summer Lee (D-Pennsylvania) on a “toxic tour” of the zipcode around Colossus 1, introducing them to family members and neighbors suffering from respiratory conditions.

Standing next to a busy road with 18-wheelers passing by and Colossus 1 behind her, Ocasio-Cortez tells reporters after the tour that it was “a lot worse than what I was expecting.”

Sometimes, the pollution here also weighs on Pearson’s wife, Oceana Gilliam-Pearson. Sitting in the back room of a church with Pearson before the rally, Gilliam-Pearson says she frequently drives past the industrial park where Colossus 1 is located on her way to law school at the University of Memphis. She worries whether living here will “shorten my life.”

“When we have children, can we even raise our kids in the home we bought in the community where he grew up in, down the street from his momma’s house?” she asks. “That’s the future we want, we want to live to be 105 years old, and right now it’s looking bleak.”

Data centers are a growing concern for Americans.

The POLITICO Poll this month finds that more people now oppose nearby data centers than support them, according to surveys conducted by the independent polling organization Public First. The new poll findsthat 41 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built within three miles of where they live. That’s up from 28 percent in a January survey. The number supporting those projects dropped during the same period, from 37 percent to 24 percent.

The backlash is starting to kill proposed data center projects. In the first quarter of 2026, at least 75 projects valued at $130 billion were disrupted by local opposition, according to the tracking company Data Center Watch. County-level moratoriums are becoming increasingly common even in conservative areas. And last month, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a moderate Democrat, ordered a one-year pause in data center construction.

The “cancellation surge” is not just rooted in concerns about the millions of gallons of water per day data centers can draw or the vast amounts of electricity they require, but also due to a “lack of transparency” on the part of technology companies, according to a recent white paper from the consulting firm Carbon Direct, which helps corporations reduce their greenhouse gas emissions.

Cases involving nondisclosure agreements, shell companies and undisclosed tenants “consistently faced sharper, faster-organizing opposition,” the group writes, concluding that “the legal benefits of concealment did not outweigh the political costs.”

The Data Center Coalition, an industry trade association, says companies producing their own power is one way they can be “responsible and responsive partners in localities where they operate.”

Still, the group admits the industry needs to do a better job of touting data centers’ benefits. Those include a gain of 5.5 million jobs nationally, contributing $927 billion to the nation’s gross domestic product and generating $204 billion in federal, state, and local taxes, according to Dan Diorio, executive vice president for governmental affairs at the Data Center Coalition.

“Getting this right ultimately benefits everyone — including the localities that host data centers and the millions of individuals, businesses and organizations that depend on this digital infrastructure every day,” says Diorio.

Recently, xAI and the City of Memphis have taken steps to address community opposition. The city now says it will dedicate 25 percent of tax revenue from the data centers to community improvements in neighborhoods closest to the facilities, while xAI in June offered its Starlink Internet service at half price to Memphis residents. A spokesperson for Democratic Mayor Paul Young did not respond to multiple requests for an interview.

The backlash is bending battle lines across the country —- and even in Pearson’s own district.

Tennessee state Sen. London Lamar is Pearson’s chief competitor in the August 6 primary. Endorsed by many current and former elected officials in Memphis, including outgoing Rep. Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.), Lamar has not been an outspoken opponent of data centers. Instead, she has pushed bills in the state legislature to require data centers to be more transparent about their water and power needs.

It's not an issue she regularly talks about at campaign stops, either. The question of a moratorium is “only a conversation because of my opponent,” she says during a phone call from a hair salon.

But during that interview Lamar reveals something she hadn't said publicly: She agrees with the idea of a moratorium. Lamar starts the conversation talking about her transparency bill. But, over the course of the 30-minute call, she seemingly convinces herself that a moratorium is needed, though she is not specific about how long it should last.

“A temporary moratorium is important because it would allow us to slow down and say, ‘Whoa, hold up here, let’s see what’s going on before we allow them to pop up every which way,’” Lamar says.

Data centers aren’t just a campaign issue for Democrats. Texas-based GOP consultant Brendan Steinhauser advises candidates to ignore data center opposition at their own risk.

“Some of them have told me that this is all just the Chinese Communist Party trying to shut down data centers,” Steinhauser says. “And it’s like, ‘Yeah, there might be some people in Beijing who want to see us not build another data center, but this is 99 percent organic and you will lose if you’re not on the right side of this.’”

Amy Kremer, a founder of the Tea Party who also helped organize the January 6, 2024 “Stop the Steal” rally on Capitol Hill, agrees.

Kremer says she has “never ever in my life advocated for more regulations or more laws,” but news reports about teenagers who committed suicide after consulting AI chatbots convinced her that “AI can be a force for good, but there have to be guardrails.”

To that end, Kremer recently organized a national day of protest at 140 data centers in 42 states calling for politicians on both sides of the aisle to end tax exemptions for the facilities and push for greater government regulation of AI models.

“I’m literally taking my Tea Party playbook to build a movement of people who care about these issues to sway the administration and Congress that this industry needs to be regulated,” she says.

Pearson is tickled when he hears about Kremer’s remarks.

“Seriously? How amazing is that?” he laughs. “The Tea Party did so much damage to our country, but it is good that we are finding common ground.”

Since May, Pearson has had to try finding common ground with voters who may not agree with him on the majority of issues. The 9th District he originally signed up to represent in Congress was confined to Shelby County, which encompasses all of Memphis. Now the county is split in thirds, with District 9 snaking along South Memphis and extending some 200 miles across 14 additional counties along the stateline into deep red areas that overwhelmingly vote Republican.

Some of his new constituents are fighting data center proposals of their own. That includes residents of solidly red Lawrence County Tennessee, which is roiled in controversy over a smaller data center than xAI’s Memphis facilities.

The 70,000 square-foot project approved by Lawrenceburg officials this winter would operate at just 4.9 megawatts — a fraction of the 1.5 gigawatts one of xAI’s data centers requires. Ryan Egly, president of the Lawrence County Chamber of Commerce, which recruited the development from SharePoint Infrastructure to Lawrenceburg, argued the $500,000 project developers pay in annual property taxes would be a net benefit to the community. So, he was shocked when a post on the Chamber’s Facebook page was met with intense opposition.

“In the grand scheme of things, this is a very small electric load, a very small amount of water they will use, and that half a million dollars brings a lot of opportunities,” he says. According to Egly, high-profile, controversial data center projects like xAI helped sour the community against the smaller local project. “I think there was a lot of misinformation shared just generalizing these developments, which isn’t really fair to the business itself.”

SharePoint did not respond to requests for comment.

Small business owner Elle McCann leads the campaign to kill the project, which she fears could ultimately expand beyond its currently-planned size. The campaign is also pushing for a moratorium in the surrounding county to prevent additional projects. Multiple petitions have garnered more than 7,000 signatures from residents of all political persuasions, she says, and residents are fundraising for a lawsuit challenging the project’s approval.

Pearson’s congressional campaign has reached out to the group, offering resources for fighting the projects and lessons learned from the xAI battle. By contrast, McCann says, comments from Republican Gubernatorial candidate Marsha Blackburn supporting supercomputing facilities has “been an instant turnoff” for people in her group.

Blackburn has come out against one controversial project proposed next to the Nashville Zoo, saying it would disturb the facility’s leopards, but says other Tennessee communities could benefit from placing supercomputing hubs in industrial parks.

“We need to realize that we want our data, whether it is phone data or it is AI data, to be stored in the US, we do not want communist China to have this, we do not want them data mining us, we do not want them tracking our people,” shetold Nashville Talk Radio last month. “Most of the decisions on where these go are going to be local zoning decisions and communities that want them are going to recruit them and communities that don’t want them are not going to recruit them.” (Blackburn did not respond to a request for comment.)

Comments like these could sway voters. “A lot of people here had their eyes opened a little bit to think maybe they need to look at other candidates, not just do a straight Republican ticket,” says McCann.

One such voter: Alan Salhany. The owner of a natural foods grocery, he says he is a registered independent who tends to vote Republican.

“Typically, I’m not for the progressive agenda,” he says. But he’s considering voting for Pearson thanks to the Lawrenceburg project planned five miles from his home. “It could very well change the equation for me.”

The project also opened his eyes to the nationwide data center boom, which he opposes due to concerns about the government and corporations using technology to surveil Americans.

“I just think we need to put a moratorium on it for at least a year if not two or three,” Salhany says, adding it is now one of his priority issues for the coming midterm elections. “This is one issue that could cause me to vote for somebody I wouldn’t otherwise pay much attention to.”

But the redistricting also cuts Pearson off from some of his most ardent supporters. The new district lines run between xAIs two facilities, lopping off the area the pipeline had been set to run through, too.

In the audience at the Get out the Vote rally are residents of the Boxtown neighborhood — who lament they can no longer vote for Pearson. He has been their advocate the past six years, first against the pipeline, and then against xAI. Batsell Booker, Sarah Gadney and Easter Knox say they still see Pearson as their best “fighter” for their community, battling the world’s richest man and his turbines.

“We want him on a bigger stage,” Booker says.

Pearson knows his victory is no sure thing. But he doesn’t hesitate when asked what will happen if he loses: “We don’t quit.”

As a state representative whose family has lived in South Memphis for four generations, he says he can’t give up advocating policies that will help his neighbors.

“Our roots are here,” Pearson says, “but also the struggle is here.”

No matter what happens, he says, he will keep pressing for a data center moratorium and other planks from his campaign, like an increased minimum wage and universal healthcare. It’s all connected for Pearson, who marvels that despite so many technological improvements since the Industrial Revolution “wages are stagnant, people are in poverty, no one has universal access to healthcare in the United States of America, but a billionaire can pollute our air and take our water to power a computer to take our jobs.”

“It’s just like, what was wrong with the Luddites?”