Early this fall, Ra’Kelle Miller had an asthma attack so bad it landed her in the hospital for six days. Ra’Kelle, 21, is a nursing student at Murray State University in Kentucky. One day, she hopes to care for people with respiratory illnesses. She’s had asthma her whole life, but nothing like this has ever happened before.
When she left her childhood home in Southwest Memphis for school in 2023, she was surprised to discover her asthma suddenly stopped bothering her. She was able to join a dance team and otherwise be active. “It was nonexistent. Then I came back home in the beginning of 2025, and my asthma started bothering me. I was running through like three, four inhalers per month,” she recalls.
To make sense of these ups and downs, she asked herself: What had changed since she came home? “I know what changed: xAI came,” she says, referring to Elon Musk’s enormous artificial intelligence supercomputer facility in South Memphis’ Boxtown community, an area long impacted by polluting industry. The majority-Black area is home to an oil refinery, a steel mill, and chemical plants. Ra’Kelle’s small college town had no such new hyperscale data centers.
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution
Connecting the dots
Ra’Kelle first learned about xAI from the local news. Her family was also talking about it; it’s just four miles from their home. “I started going to city council and county commission meetings to get involved and figure out what’s really going in the air,” she says. Sometimes her mom or sisters would join her. She threw herself into volunteering to make her voice heard within the community—doing research and being “super hands on.”
One local environmental justice organization, Memphis Community Against Pollution (MCAP), noticed her dedication and offered her a fellowship. For MCAP, she researches, organizes, and makes sure the community stays informed about environmental-justice related issues. “That could be anything that’s affecting air pollution, but it also can be water pollution, soil pollution, anything environment-related that’s going to affect the community,” she says.
Defining the issues
When informing neighbors about the concerns regarding xAI, Ra’Kelle is succinct: “xAI is basically a hyperscale data center that’s running methane gas turbines. It emits formaldehyde, nitrogen oxides, and can affect people with respiratory illnesses like asthma and cancer. It also can start cancer,” she says.
Critically, she points out that it’s “so close to us and is not doing anything for us.” Pro data center rhetoric often centers on the claim that its main benefit is financial. That doesn’t sway Ra’Kelle. “I look at the size of it, how it’s going to affect our health now and in the future,” she says.
Ra’Kelle believes the people responsible for siting xAI in South Memphis didn’t plan on the local community caring so deeply about their health or future. “Boxtown is an overlooked environment. People there didn’t get running electricity and water until the late 1970s. It’s outrageous. This community has already been overlooked for so long. So it’s like, why not overlook them again? Who cares? That’s what they thought. They didn’t expect this type of pushback from the community,” she says, proudly.
Youth involvement and history
Driving the movement against xAI is a unique blend of local history and motivated young people, Ra’Kelle notes. “A lot of people growing up in Memphis connect the dots on how past pollution has affected our family members—losing loved ones to respiratory illnesses and cancer,” she says.
Her own grandmother passed away at 21 years old, Ra’Kelle’s age now. “She lived a street away from the district I live in now. My entire family, we’ve always been really close to Boxtown… When my great grandmother had my grandmother, the doctors warned her to move away from Memphis. They told her that the air quality was too bad, it might be detrimental to her. They knew then those dots were connected. She still stayed. She passed away from an asthma attack from the pollution in Memphis.”
The fact that this same thing is still happening today is what motivates Ra’Kelle and other local young people to fight for cleaner air in her community. In Ra’Kelle’s experience, young people are especially eager to get involved.
A massive asthma attack
Also super motivating is her health and being hospitalized for six days. “I could have just lost my life,” she shares. The massive attack happened on a normal day at home. She went to take her dog out for a walk, was outside for two minutes at most, and started to struggle to breathe. “I came back in the house and left the leash on my dog.” Her mom was confused by how fast her walk had been. “I don’t know what happened. I just can’t breathe,” she told her mom. She tried her inhaler. It didn’t work. She tried her mother’s inhaler, but it also didn’t work. “I’m starting to panic,” she recalls. She tried her nebulizer.
“I remember my sister came in. She was trying to calm me down. She was like, Try to breathe. And I’m starting to get really scared because it’s not helping at all. She was holding me, and that’s the last thing I remember. I passed out, and I woke up in the hospital.” Her sister had called 911.
Ra’Kelle had never passed out before. Nothing worked to bring her to alertness until she got to the hospital, where it took days to stop her wheezing. Before she was released, her doctor told her she might want to wear a mask some days. No one said anything directly about xAI, but the doctor explained the air is “too heavy” for her to breathe sometimes. “So it’s there. You know, they can indirectly say stuff without directly saying it.”
Fighting xAI
Not even an asthma attack of this magnitude can slow Ra’Kelle from her position at the forefront of the local fight to get a moratorium to pause xAI. “It wouldn’t stop it, but it would allow our city officials time to study the impact of it and actually pass a zoning law or a beneficial law saying this is a safe way to do it. We don’t want the methane gas turbines right by our communities,” she explains the reasoning behind the proposed moratorium.
Unfortunately, in late October, the moratorium did not pass. This won’t stop Ra’Kelle or her community from continuing to fight for cleaner air. “The pollution isn’t going to stay in Southwest Memphis. It’s going to spread and affect all of Memphis. I’ll definitely stay the course.”
Tell Congress: Protect Families From Dangerous Data Center Air Pollution