xAI Loses Bid to Kill NAACP Suit Over Gas Turbines

xAI will have to defend the power plant behind its biggest data center in court. On Friday, 30 October, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi denied xAI’s motion to dismiss a Clean Air Act lawsuit brought by the NAACP over the gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, that supply electricity to the company’s Colossus 2 data center across the state line in Memphis. The NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) and Earthjustice, says xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech built and run the plant without the air permits the law requires for a major source of pollution.

xAI, now owned by SpaceX, had attacked the case on three fronts, TechCrunch reported: that the turbines are exempt from permitting because they are mobile, that the plaintiffs lacked standing, and that citizen lawsuits of this kind are themselves unconstitutional. Judge Debra M. Brown rejected all three. Because the plant “is not a ‘mobile source’ according to the federal regulations,” she wrote, it “was not (and is not) exempted from permitting requirements.” On the constitutional point, she held that citizen plaintiffs who sue in their own name for harm to themselves “are not exercising the federal government’s executive power.” The so-called temporary turbines, in other words, are a power plant in the eyes of the court.

It is the second time in a month the case has survived an attempt to end it. Earlier in October the same court turned down the Justice Department, which had argued that the federal government could unilaterally dismiss the citizen suit; the court found “no ‘fairly possible’ interpretation of the Clean Air Act” that gave it that right, although it let the government intervene. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had already refused the department’s request to pause the proceedings. “The courts have repeatedly rejected attempts by xAI and the DOJ to dismiss the NAACP’s Clean Air Act case,” said Abre’ Conner, the NAACP’s director of environmental and climate justice.

The size of the plant is what makes the case matter. When the NAACP served notice in February it counted 27 turbines; by the time it asked for a preliminary injunction in May, six more had been installed, some of the largest on the site, bringing the total to 33, and TechCrunch now puts it at no fewer than 35. SELC estimates the turbines can emit more than 5,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, 400 tons of fine particulate matter and 47 tons of formaldehyde a year, pollutants tied to asthma, heart disease and cancer, in an area of homes, schools and churches in North Mississippi and South Memphis. They feed a site that Elon Musk has said will hold more than 1.2 million Nvidia chips. The court has not yet ruled on the injunction that would force the turbines to stop.

TechCrunch said it had asked SpaceX for comment. The ruling lands as resistance to data centers spreads beyond environmental groups: New York has halted construction of new data centers, and local fights over power and water are turning into election issues. Running gas turbines on site has been the industry’s fastest answer to a grid that cannot connect new campuses quickly enough. A judge has now said, at least at this stage, that speed does not buy an exemption from the permits every other power plant needs, and the rest of the industry has every reason to read the order closely.