Company says it is moving away from gas turbine power.
Civil rights group the NAACP has called on regulators in Memphis to shut down a data center belonging to Elon Musk’s xAI over concerns that it may not be compliant with environmental legislation.
In a letter to Dr. Michelle Taylor, director of the Shelby County Health Department, and officials at utility company Memphis Light Gas and Water, the NAACP claims xAI is operating in violation of the law and should face penalties.
The data center in the Boxtown area of Memphis is home to Colossus, xAI’s supercomputer. It came online last year and has been partly powered by a fleet of polluting natural gas turbines, causing concern among residents.
xAI has previously stated it complies with all relevant legislation. The company says it is moving away from using turbines, but has an application in with the Health Department for permission to install 15 of the machines as permanent fixtures, though these will be for backup power only.
In its letter, the NAACP said it is urging the Shelby County Health Department to “ensure that xAI stops operating its unpermitted turbines in violation of clean air and open meeting act laws and to order xAI to pay penalties for operating in violation of the law.”
It continued: “Moreover, the message that SCHD and MLGW have sent to the community is that billionaires matter more than the taxpayers and residents who live there.”
It is thought up to 35 turbines were present at the xAI data center, generating 422MW of power. In April, environmental campaigners claimed some of these were operating without permits and in violation of the Clean Air Act. Last month, the company said it was removing half of the turbines after a new electricity substation came online. A second substation should be up and running in the Fall, at which time the remaining turbines would be relegated to a backup power role.
The data center is being used to train and run the company’s AI chatbot, Grok, and is located on an industrial park at Paul Lowry Road, in southwest Memphis, at the site of a former Electrolux factory. Last October, Musk announced that the data center's capacity was set to double, with the facility in the process of adding an additional 100,000 Nvidia Hopper GPUs to the cluster.
The company has since installed 168 Tesla Megapack battery energy storage units at the site.
xAI is also planning to build a second data center in Memphis, having purchased a 1 million sq ft site on Tulane Road, which is located in the Whitehaven area of the city.
