SZA

SZA (born Solána Rowe, 1989, in St. Louis, raised in Maplewood, New Jersey) redefined contemporary R&B with Ctrl (2017) and the blockbuster SOS (2022), whose chart run and Grammy haul made her one of the most commercially and critically dominant artists of the decade.

Environmental racism and the machine

In July 2025, SZA used Instagram to attack AI from an angle most musicians ignore: infrastructure. Writing that “Ai is killing and polluting black and brown cities,” she pointed at Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer in South Memphis — whose unpermitted gas turbines in a majority-Black area later drew an NAACP Clean Air Act lawsuit — and told followers to “PLEASE JUST GOOGLE ENVIRONMENTAL RACISM.” That September she added on X that people “are dying from the harm n pollution Ai energy centers are creating.”

In June 2026 the fight got personal: SZA said she had learned 238 of her songs, including unreleased tracks, were used to train the AI music platform Suno. On Instagram Stories she told fellow Black musicians not to give their “vibranium” away to AI, called supporters of AI music “vultures,” and accused producer Diplo of holding equity in Suno and pushing it on Black writers and producers — a claim without public confirmation, though the Wall Street Journal had identified Diplo as an investor in a different AI startup.

Her rhetoric is maximalist — “Al doesn’t give a fuck if you live or die I promise” — but the Memphis grievance beneath it is concrete and documented, sitting at the junction of AI’s energy appetite and America’s oldest siting patterns for industrial pollution.