xAI has added 19 natural gas turbines to its second data center campus in Southhaven, Mississippi, over the past two months, according to internal emails seen by WIRED.
The additions come as xAI is fighting a lawsuit from the NAACP and several environmental groups, alleging that the company is violating the Clean Air Act by operating more than two dozen natural gas turbines at the site without appropriate air permits.
Emails between an official in the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and a representative from Trinity Consultants, obtained via a public records request by the Southern Environmental Law Center and shared with WIRED, show that xAI installed 19 portable gas turbines on its site in Southaven between late March and early May. That brings the total to 46 turbines operating at the site.
A spreadsheet included in the email to MDEQ, has a column labeled “Total Power Output” that appears to list the megawatt capacity of each turbine on the site. xAI appears to have added more than 500 megawatts of natural gas turbines since mid-March.
Burning natural gas can release planet-warming emissions and worsen air quality. Officials at the MDEQ and xAI did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. The additions of the new turbines to the site, dubbed Colossus 2, were first reported by Mississippi Today.
“As indicated by the facility, all portable/temporary turbines are equipped with control technology to minimize emissions,” agency spokesperson Jan Schaefer told Mississippi Today. “MDEQ is evaluating the situation and will make the facility aware as to when it can no longer bring additional portable/temporary turbines on-site.”
In April, the NAACP, along with the SELC and Earthjustice, filed a lawsuit against xAI, alleging that the company had been operating a “personal power plant” in Southaven by running 27 gas turbines without the necessary permits. Ben Grillot, a lawyer with SELC, says that the organization noticed six additional turbines at the site during a drone flyover in April. Only after getting the MDEQ emails did the team realize there were 19 new turbines. According to the dates on the email seen by WIRED, eight of the 19 new turbines, representing more than 200 megawatts of output, were installed after the lawsuit was filed.
The original xAI site, Colossus 1, located over the state border in Memphis, Tennessee, received widespread criticism in 2024 after locals alleged that gas turbines at that site were being run without a permit. Colossus 1 sits in Boxtown, a historically Black neighborhood which has long had problems with bad air quality.
Regulators in both Tennessee and Mississippi have said that because xAI’s turbines are not stationary, it has a year to operate them without permits under the Clean Air Act. Last July, Memphis’s local health department granted a permit for the turbines at the Colossus 1 site, despite intense community opposition. In March, faced with similar community outcry, the MDEQ granted an air permit for the Southaven site to run 41 gas turbines. (SELC says that the 27 turbines in its lawsuit and the ones added to the site in recent months are not part of this permit. Neither xAI nor the MDEQ answered WIRED’s questions about whether the turbines listed in the emails are covered by the air permit granted in March.) Drone footage and public records obtained by news outlet Floodlight show that multiple turbines at the site were running in the weeks before the MDEQ granted the permit.
Both Colossus sites are hooked up to local power grids, but are designed to also lean heavily on the power provided by the onsite gas turbines. The 27 original turbines, according to legal filings from the NAACP, represent 495 megawatts of generating capacity, “enough to power 400,000 homes.”
“It’s absolutely crazy,” Grillot says of the new turbines.
Last week, the NAACP filed for an emergency injunction against xAI, asking the court to shut down the turbines at Colossus 2. In its response, xAI said that the data centers powered by the turbines “are essential to the operation of cutting-edge artificial intelligence and other computing tools used by the U.S. government and millions of users worldwide, every day. But those data centers cannot currently function, and would have to precipitously shut down, without the temporary power generation equipment in question.”
The same day that the NAACP asked for its injunction, Anthropic announced that it had signed an agreement with xAI to use all the computing resources at Colossus 1. In a post on X, Elon Musk said that training for SpaceXAI—the new term for the result of the merger between SpaceX and xAI, which happened earlier this year—had “already moved” to Colossus 2. (Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment.)
“Any company that disregards the obvious environmental and health concerns of Black communities to supposedly power a future that will help us all is sending a clear message about who it intends to serve in that future,” Abre’ Conner, NAACP Director of Environmental and Climate Justice, tells WIRED in a statement. “As we have done since xAI forced its way into Memphis, we will continue to stand with the communities most impacted by these decisions,” she adds.
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