Elon Musk’s xAI has added 19 more natural gas turbines to its AI data center site in Southaven, Mississippi. This is despite an ongoing lawsuit alleging that the company was already operating 27 unpermitted methane gas generators to power the nearby Colossus 2 complex in South Memphis, which it uses to train its Grok AI assistant.
As first reported mississippi today (And since it has been confirmed wired), xAI now has a total of 46 portable gas turbines at the Southaven site, mississippi today The quantity is reportedly more than double what arrived in the southern state last year. 19 new generators were installed between March 25 and May 6, and the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality reported mississippi today xAI reported about the new additions earlier this week, and said Musk’s company is under no obligation to do so.
Because the generators are considered by regulators to be mobile in nature, regardless of the public health risk their emissions pose, XAI is allowed to operate them for up to a year without obtaining an air permit. Last summer, Was The turbines were given permission by Memphis’ local health department to operate at its original Colossus site, located in the largely black community of Boxtown.
Pollution from methane gas generators in neighborhoods like Boxtown was the basis of last month’s lawsuit, brought by the NAACP, alleging that XAI is mishandling and violating the Clean Air Act by running its turbines without a permit.
Ben Grillot, a senior attorney at the Southern Environmental Law Center, said at the time, “For XAI to continue operating these turbines without permits and adequate pollution controls is not only illegal, it is an insult to the families living nearby, who have expressed serious concerns for months about how air pollution from the company’s private power plant could affect their health and well-being.” “XAI must be held accountable for its reckless, unlawful actions – and that is the goal of this lawsuit.”
As mississippi today points out, the state is unable to measure the toxicity of emissions without a permit, and the success of the NAACP’s lawsuit depends partly on whether decision makers can be convinced that the turbines should be defined as stationary under the law.
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