WaPo: “For decades, this storied American city has watched companies come but mostly go, its vacant storefronts and blighted buildings a reminder of its days as a thriving manufacturing hub and the painful decline that followed as those jobs vanished.
As Paul Young, the city’s mayor, puts it, Memphis has been “the city people forgot about.”
Then last summer, Memphis landed what Young and local business leaders called the city’s largest corporate investment in a generation — a “transformative” development for a place that has struggled to convince outsiders of its continued potential.
The project was something every city dreams of, Young said in a recent interview — an estimated $12 billion private investment that came with no requests for tax incentives or other economic concessions demanded of Memphis in the past, one he believed could create hundreds of jobs. “A game changer,” he said.
Then came the mic drop, as some Memphians tell it: The city’s surprise suitor was Elon Musk. The tech billionaire had chosen a long-vacant appliance factory on the city’s south side to be the site of a multibillion-dollar supercomputer that would power his foray into the intense race to develop the world’s most sophisticated artificial intelligence model.”