Last year, Elon Musk promised that xAI would donate a large sum to the Memphis-Shelby County school system to help rehabilitate four schools near its data centers. Laura Testino reported on the commitment at the time:
In its proposal to the district, xAI offered support for four different schools in areas of Whitehaven and Westwood near its data centers:
- John P. Freeman Optional School
- Fairley High School
- Mitchell High School
- Westwood High School
At each school, the company has proposed upgrades to the HVAC units that heat and cool the schools, plus improvements to plumbing, lighting and windows. XAI has also offered to paint at the schools.
This map shows the location of the schools in green, with xAI’s sites in red and its power plant in Southaven, MS in yellow.
(For a sense of scale, it’s about nine miles across.)
xAI said work could start as early as the morning after the school board voted to accept the gift. Of course, that is not how anything works in the real world, and it took the school board and company until September of last year to finalize a plan to account for the fact that these schools couldn’t be torn apart during the school year.
To the company’s credit, some work has been completed; however, it is far from what was originally promised, and now SpaceXAI seems to want to rework the deal. Testino writes:
So far, donations have improved two campuses rather than four, according to MSCS. Those projects — campus beautification efforts at John P. Freeman School and a major locker room renovation at Fairley High — have made a small dent in the large list of SpaceXAI’s offerings.
They also came with a $5 million donation cap that wasn’t part of the initial proposal.
That $5 million cap can not fund the initial list of projects, even if they had been started. Neither Mitchell High nor Westwood High have seen any of the promised improvements.
More importantly, the agreement expired June 30 and has not been renewed. SpaceXAI says it is still “committed to completing critical upgrades to schools in the Memphis region,” but that doesn’t seem to be the case at this point.
I am not surprised that the company would back away from previously made promises,1 nor am I surprised that my local leaders would be naive enough not to see this coming.