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Calkins: Time to hold Musk and xAI to ‘the one promise they’ve made.’

By , Daily Memphian Updated: April 10, 2026 6:35 AM CT | Published: April 10, 2026 4:00 AM CT
Geoff Calkins
Daily Memphian

Geoff Calkins

Geoff Calkins has been chronicling Memphis and Memphis sports for more than two decades. Calkins has been named the best sports columnist in the country five times by the Associated Press sports editors, but still figures his best columns are about the people who make Memphis what it is.

Sarah Houston read the email at around 11 a.m. Wednesday.

“It was cryptic,” she said. “From an address I wasn’t familiar with. It was out of Virginia. It said that xAI was canceling the water treatment plant.”


XAI promised it would save billions of gallons of fresh drinking water every year by recycling wastewater. Now, that’s in doubt.


Houston, the executive director of Protect Our Aquifer, got in her car and headed out to the site where the promised water-recycling facility was being built.

“So when the news broke, I was already at the site, seeing what was going on,” she said. “A couple cranes looked like they were coming down. I was out there, like, ‘S---.”

Well, yeah.

What she said.

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Elon Musk xAI water-recycling Colussus Subscriber Only

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