Elon Musk’s xAI has added a further 19 natural gas turbines to its Southhaven, Mississippi-based AI data center site. This is despite an ongoing lawsuit alleging the company was already operating 27 unpermitted methane gas generators to power the nearby Colossus 2 campus in South Memphis, which it uses to train its Grok AI assistant.
As first reported by Mississippi Today (and since corroborated by Wired), xAI now has a total of 46 portable gas turbines on its Southaven site, which Mississippi Today reports is more than double the amount it had when it arrived in the southern state last year. The 19 new generators were installed between March 25 and May 6, and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality told Mississippi Today that xAI had notified it of the new additions earlier this week, adding that Musk’s company is not obligated to do so.
Because the generators are judged to be of a mobile nature by regulators, xAI is allowed to run them for up to a year without obtaining an air permit, despite the public health risk their emissions pose. Last summer, xAI was granted a permit by Memphis’ local health department to run turbines at its original Colossus site, located in the largely Black community of Boxtown.
The pollution methane gas generators inflict upon neighborhoods like Boxtown was the basis of last month’s lawsuit, brought by the NAACP, which alleged that xAI is misunderstanding and violating the Clean Air Act by running its turbines without permits.
“xAI’s continued operation of these turbines without a permit and without adequate pollution controls is not only illegal, it’s an insult to families living nearby who for months have expressed serious concerns about how air pollution from the company’s personal power plant could impact their health and well-being,” Ben Grillot, a Senior Attorney for the Southern Environmental Law Center, said at the time. “xAI must be held accountable for its reckless, unlawful actions — and that’s exactly what this lawsuit aims to do.”
As Mississippi Today points out, the state is unable to measure the toxicity of emissions without permits, and the success of NAACP’s suit seems to rest partially on whether decision-makers can be convinced that the turbines should be defined as stationary under law.
