Since June 2024, Elon Musk’s tech company, xAI, has run a massive data center known as Colossus in South Memphis that powers its chatbot Grok. It’s powered by dozens of methane-burning turbines — as many as 35 at one point — that are completely unpermitted.
Despite public outrage over the facility, however, xAI has made no significant changes to its operation. So the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center are preparing to sue Musk for violating the Clean Air Act.
“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. “We cannot afford to normalize this kind of environmental injustice — where 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. We will not allow xAI to get away with this.”
Environmental Injustice
Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney with SELC, helped prepare the complaint against xAI on behalf of the NAACP. He says xAI “has been adding new turbines still and so we finally decided nobody else is going to take action and so we would have to.”…