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Data center boom could leave Americans 'on the hook' for big costs
The reporting was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center . MEMPHIS, TN — More than three decades after serving in Operation Desert Storm, Loretta Young Thornton never expected the sounds of war to follow her home. Thornton, 66, spent nearly 25 years in the Tennessee Army National Guard, serving as a military police officer before retiring as a decorated sergeant in 2004. She also built a career with the U.S. Postal Service. After a lifetime of work, she poured her savings into a modest, four-bedroom home built in the 1920s on a secluded two-acre lot in Memphis, near the Mississippi state line. She named it Serenity. When Thornton bought the house in 2014, the surrounding woods were home to deer, squirrels, hawks and wild turkeys. At night, she listened to the calls of owls, including one she affectionately called her boyfriend. Then the trees came down, sending clouds of dust swirling toward Thornton's home. In their place rose Colossus 2, a massive data center built for billionaire Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI. The sprawling complex, designed to house thousands of powerful computer chips to train the next generation of AI models, sits just across the railroad tracks