How an Ex-Oilman Became the Face of Elon Musk’s Supercomputers

Over the past few years, Brent Mayo has gone from working on oil rigs in Dubai and South Korea to building supercomputers for xAI. Now, he’s critical to Elon Musk’s ambitions to crush OpenAI—and at the center of a battle over pollution in Memphis.

In February, a peace summit of sorts took place on the top floor of Memphis City Hall. On one side there were a handful of local politicians and environmental activists. On the other was the city’s mayor, Paul Young, and Brent Mayo—a youthful, bearded, hoodie-clad Texan—who came with a message that his boss, Elon Musk, had become grumpy with Memphis.

In a speech laced with expletives, Mayo told the group that the billionaire was upset with the amount of local opposition to an enormous data center that Musk’s artificial intelligence startup, xAI, had recently opened in the city, according to two people who were in the room. As a result, Mayo said, Musk wanted to scrap a plan for xAI to build a facility that would allow the data center—the grandiosely named Colossus—to cool its computers using recycled wastewater.