Over the last three years, Devan Jenkins has watched the trees around her family home give way to industrial development.
Directly in front of her property along the Mississippi-Tennessee border sits a tangle of massive power lines, an extension of the electrical grid operated by Memphis Light, Gas and Water.
At the end of her street, a few hundred yards away from her bedroom, sprawls Colossus 2, the second data center built by Elon Musk’s company xAI to power his controversial AI chatbot, Grok.
And less than two miles across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, is an xAI-owned energy plant with over two-dozen towering gas turbines.
The arrival of the turbines last summer has disrupted daily life on Jenkins’ property, adding a deep, persistent drone that seeps through walls and windows and permeates the house she shares with her grandparents. The sound continues through the day and often intensifies at night, she explained, making it hard to think clearly and even harder to fall asleep.
“You can feel it rattling your eardrums,” said Jenkins. “It makes you feel like you’re going insane.”
Jenkins is one of many area residents who oppose xAI’s growing presence in their backyards, fearing what its operations could mean for their health and the surrounding environment. At a public hearing in Southaven last month, hundreds of community members and allies denounced the company’s practices, accusing it of violating federal law and recklessly endangering public safety.
The hearing centered on a then-proposed permit allowing an xAI subsidiary to install over 40 permanent gas turbines at its Southaven plant. Those machines would replace 27 temporary turbines that have operated without permits for the better part of a year.
Though the plan drew unanimous opposition at the Southaven public hearing, some residents worried that xAI would still get its way.
“It seems to me that we are being very thoroughly thrown under the bus,” said Angie Davis, a former choir director who moved from Memphis to Southaven three decades ago. Her daughter and granddaughter live in the neighborhood next to the unpermitted gas turbines, and she believes the location of the engines — and xAI’s broader incursion into Southaven — was no accident.
“I don’t think it would have been done if the powers that be thought we could fight back.”
A Familiar Pattern
xAI’s activities in Memphis and subsequent push into Mississippi have been contentious, even by data center standards. To get its inaugural data center, Colossus 1, up and running as swiftly as possible, the company relied on unpermitted combustion turbines powered by methane gas, installing as many as 35 of the machines in Memphis’ Boxtown neighborhood.
The move sparked widespread backlash and sustained protest from residents, leading xAI to obtain permits for some of those turbines last summer.
xAI has followed the same blueprint for Colossus 2 in Memphis’ Whitehaven neighborhood, placing up to 27 unpermitted turbines at a nearby facility in Southaven and using them to meet the data center’s energy needs while construction is ongoing. The company plans to build a third data center in Southaven in the coming months but has yet to reveal how the facility will be powered.
In addition to being noisy, methane gas turbines emit an array of harmful air pollutants, including highly reactive gases known as nitrogen oxides that contribute to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses. They also release particulate matter — a mix of airborne particles and droplets found to worsen asthma and other chronic conditions — and formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.
Despite these public health risks, the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality has allowed xAI to forgo permits for the turbines at the Southaven plant, claiming state permitting requirements exempt turbines classified as “temporary-mobile” engines for up to a year. Critics say the absence of permits means that xAI has been free to operate the machines without set emissions limits or pollution controls since August 2025.
“(xAI) has a long and sordid history of running their temporary turbines well before permissions were in place for them to do so,” Charly Park, an area resident and member of a local coalition opposing the xAI plant, said at the public hearing on Feb. 17. “They did it in Memphis, and as expected, they did it again in Southaven.”
On Jan. 15, the Environmental Protection Agency updated pollution control standards for gas turbines under the Clean Air Act, including language that environmental groups say affirms that temporary gas turbines do require permits. The update puts xAI’s Southaven turbines at odds with federal law, the groups allege, opening the door to legal challenges like one announced by the NAACP on Feb. 13.
“Federal law supersedes state statute,” LaTricea Adams, founder and president of the nonprofit Young, Gifted and Green, said at the Feb. 17 public hearing. “The Clean Air Act is not optional, but somehow xAI is still actively breaking the law.”
xAI did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
MDEQ, meanwhile, maintains that the EPA’s new standards do not explicitly impose permitting requirements on temporary turbines like the ones located in Southaven. That decision, agency officials explained, still falls on state authorities.
“There are federal regulations that outright mandate that a (pollution) source get an air permit,” MDEQ Air Division Chief Jaricus Whitlock said in an interview last month. “We have seen no such language like that in this new turbine rule.”
New Permit, Same Power Source
To supply long-term power to its Colossus 2 data center, xAI requested a state permit last summer authorizing 41 permanent gas turbines at its Southaven plant. The installation would create a “behind-the-meter” electrical plant with a power generation capacity of about 1.2 gigawatts — more than half the maximum output of Hoover Dam.
Because emissions at the site would exceed certain regulatory thresholds, xAI’s plant would be subject to several Clean Air Act requirements, like equipping its turbines with various control technologies to curtail harmful releases.
Plant operators would also have to conduct an analysis showing that facility emissions would not cause or contribute to violations of ambient air quality standards.
“By adhering to the emission limitation operational restrictions and compliance assurance mechanisms incorporated into the … permit, the proposed facility can comply with all applicable Mississippi and federal environmental laws, regulations and air quality standards,” MDEQ’s Jaricus Whitlock stated at the public hearing in Southaven.
In the leadup to that hearing, however, the Southern Environmental Law Center released an independent study showing far-reaching public health harms from xAI’s proposed power generation facility.
Led by a researcher at Harvard University, the study found that adding 41 permanent turbines to the xAI site would dramatically increase particulate matter pollution in the Memphis metro area. Researchers calculated that this spike would translate to up to $44 million in estimated health damage each year, due to premature deaths, hospital visits, lost productivity and other factors.
Exposure would be most pronounced in South Memphis neighborhoods, which are disproportionately Black and already overburdened with chronic illness.
“This is a clean, clear-cut case of environmental racism,” said Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, whose district includes part of the area. “Communities that have been historically polluted are consistently being polluted by new entrants and new corporations — that’s the playbook that they’re following.”
At the Southaven hearing, attendees warned that xAI’s requested turbines would add hundreds of tons of yearly pollution to an area already experiencing poor air quality. Last year, DeSoto County, Mississippi, and Shelby County, Tennessee, both received an “F” rating from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution, residents pointed out, and the turbines would introduce new contaminants on either side of the state line.
“Bottom line, it’s an unprecedented amount of air pollution, and it’s scary,” said Lauren Van, a resident of Walls, Mississippi, living a few miles from the xAI power plant. “We all breathe the same air, and the pollution is not isolated to Southaven.”
Other participants warned that the permit would have lasting consequences for public health, noting that their families are already feeling the effects of the unpermitted turbines at the facility.
“Breathing has become more difficult than it should ever be. This is not an inconvenience — this is a health crisis inside my own home,” said Chestela Farmer, a Southaven resident and mother who lives in the neighborhood next to the xAI plant. “No parents should have to watch their child struggle to breathe and wonder if the air around them is the cause.”
With xAI continuing to run its temporary turbines and expanding its footprint in Southaven, public hearing attendees urged regulators to prioritize people over industry and avoid bringing more pollution into the area.
“The people of Southaven are not collateral damage,” said Rodney Paullus, a Southaven resident and medical professional. “We are not expendable.”
Turbines Win Approval
Those who feared xAI’s request would be granted were correct. Exactly three weeks after the public meeting in Southaven, a Mississippi regulatory board unanimously approved the permit, clearing the way for the company to begin adding permanent turbines at its local plant.
The approval sparked “absolute dread” in resident Shannon Samsa, who described the decision as an inflection point for Southaven and neighboring communities.
“For us, this is not just one more permit application,” Samsa told the Mississippi board shortly before the decision was announced. “It is our homes and our health, our community, and it is our entire lives.”
Samsa says Southaven residents are now contemplating legal action to address noise and air pollution from the xAI plant. She’s lost hope that state authorities will place tougher constraints on the site and shield her community from further harm.
“Every single system and person who’s supposed to protect us has failed to do so,” she concluded. “It’s clear that (xAI and its executives) think they’re invincible and are just going to do whatever they want, consequences be damned.”
This story is a product of the Mississippi River Basin Ag & Water Desk, an independent reporting network based at the University of Missouri.. in partnership with Report for America, with major funding from the Walton Family Foundation.