Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence data center in Memphis, Tennessee, faces a lawsuit over air pollution from the fleet of mobile gas-fired turbines the company uses to power the massive computer facility, called Colossus.
On Tuesday, the nonprofit Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) told Musk’s artificial intelligence company, xAI, that it will sue on behalf of the NAACP. The 60-day notice of intent to sue is a prerequisite to filing a lawsuit under the Clean Air Act.
As Newsweek reported last August, xAI installed dozens of natural gas turbines rather than wait for a connection to the local electric grid. The SELC said in its legal notice Tuesday that xAI has been operating the turbines without any air quality permits, sending hazardous pollution into a low-income community that already suffers from dirty air.
“We have on four different occasions sent formal requests to the local health department asking for them to use their authority to enforce the law,” SELC senior attorney Patrick Anderson told Newsweek. “Obviously, that hasn’t happened.”
Anderson said that during that time, Musk’s company has added more turbines at the facility as it ramps up computing power at the Colossus site.
“It’s made us realize, no one else is going to take action so we’ve got to do it,” he said. Anderson said the turbines should be shut down until they are properly permitted. “We believe that a permit that would authorize all of these turbines would, at a bare minimum, require pollution controls that they’re not currently using,” he said.
The SELC said that gas turbines emit smog-forming nitrogen oxide pollution and hazardous chemicals such as formaldehyde, pollutants tied to health problems such as respiratory and heart disease.
The Colossus site is in a former electronic manufacturing facility in south Memphis near a predominantly Black community called Boxtown. Air quality in the area is already diminished by other industrial sources of emissions, and health data shows that Boxtown residents have cancer risk that is far higher than the national average.
“All too often, big corporations like xAI treat our communities and families like obstacles to be pushed aside,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement Tuesday. “Billion-dollar companies set up polluting operations in Black neighborhoods without any permits and think they’ll get away with it because the people don’t have the power to fight back.”
In a short statement via email, a spokesperson for xAI told Newsweek that the power units are “operating in compliance with all applicable laws” at the Colossus site.
“We take our commitment to the community and environment seriously,” the spokesperson wrote.
On its web site, however, xAI highlights the speed with which the company built Colossus, which it claims is the world’s biggest supercomputer.
“We took the project into our own hands, questioned everything, removed whatever was unnecessary, and accomplished our goal in four months,” xAI said on its site.
The company said it has 200,000 graphic processing units (GPUs) in operation and that “this is just the beginning.”
The legal action against xAI comes at a pivotal moment in the tech industry’s race to construct AI data centers and find enough power to operate the energy-intensive computer servers. Next month, President Donald Trump is scheduled to attend an event at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Mellon University focused on powering AI.
AI is contributing to a surge in electricity demand, and energy supply has become a limiting factor for data centers as tech companies often face long waits to connect to regional grids. Many companies are instead developing on-site or “behind the meter” energy for data centers, including renewable wind and solar, battery storage, fuel cells and gas-fired mobile turbines.
The SELC’s Anderson said part of his group’s goal is to make sure that AI is powered in ways that don’t illegally pollute.
“There is a right way to do it and a wrong way,” Anderson said. “If it is the wrong way then someone’s going to hold them accountable.”
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