In South Memphis, Elon Musk’s Colossus operated gas turbines without appropriate permits, residents and activists claim
Kevin Dietsch via Getty Images
In an area long plagued by air pollution, permitting irregularities have opponents of what’s predicted to be the world’s largest supercomputing facility fearing the world’s richest man is getting special treatment.
This article was originally published by Inside Climate News.
The Shelby County Health Department in Memphis has approved an air quality permit that will allow Elon Musk’s supercomputer facility—Colossus—to continue burning gas, despite more than a year of protests and numerous campaigns by residents and climate activists who opposed what they said was illegal operation of 35 gas-fueled turbines to power the facility.
The day after the July 2 approval, a Code Orange air quality alert signaled that pollution levels could pose health risks for sensitive groups in the area.
“Our local leaders are entrusted with protecting us from corporations violating our right to clean air, but we are witnessing their failure to do so,” said KeShaun Pearson, director of Memphis Community Against Pollution. “We are devastated yet we remain determined to the mission of justice for our families in South Memphis who are overburdened with air pollution.”
In a city that already had an F rating from the American Lung Association for its elevated asthma rate, and a community where studies have linked cancer rates significantly higher than the national average to emissions from industry, the violation of the city and federal rules over a new source of air pollution has outraged residents and environmental advocates.
But the close, if volatile, relationship of the data center’s owner—the richest man in the world—with President Donald Trump has left many of them concerned that the federal government could continue to turn a blind eye to permitting violations and excessive pollution from what’s reported to be the world’s largest AI-training supercomputer.
Many residents of the predominantly Black neighborhoods living near the so-called industrial zone of Shelby County were outraged by Colossus even before the turbines started spinning—shocked by the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce announcement in June 2024 that Musk would build the data center in the city.
A year earlier, they had celebrated the closure of the Sterilization Services of Tennessee plant that had for decades contaminated the air of the surrounding community with ethylene oxide, a chemical documented as carcinogenic in humans.
But during the anniversary month they learned they would soon have to deal with new emissions from Musk’s turbines.
“It’s not fair to us that we have to deal with whatever comes out of this plant,” said Dorthy Seawood, a resident, whose mother died after a long battle with cancer.
Her city has a legacy of pollution. In addition to the recently closed sterilization facility, this corner of Memphis has been home to a refinery, a steel company and several other plants that pumped out the toxic fumes that earned the area its reputation for asthma, cancer and other ailments connected to air pollution.
Despite that history and the community’s concerns about its air quality, Seawood and many other residents learned through a press release from one of the town’s environmental watchdogs, the Southern Environmental Law Center, that xAI had installed and had been using the turbines to generate power for its electricity-hungry servers without a permit.
“We’ve dealt with enough, and we shouldn’t have to deal with any more,” she said, echoing the sentiments of many residents who are uniting to fight against what they see as another in a long list of environmental injustices.
One of the environmental advocacy groups opposing the use of the turbines is Memphis Community Against Pollution.
State Rep. Justin J. Pearson (D-Memphis), president of the group’s board of directors, criticized the secrecy surrounding the xAI project. Decisions were being made on behalf of the community without input from residents by elected officials and leaders of the city’s economic development who had signed nondisclosure agreements, Pearson said.
“We have more children in this neighborhood who are hospitalized due to asthma than anywhere else in the state of Tennessee,” he said. “We have 22 of the 30 large polluters [in the state] in the neighborhood where xAI is now operating. We can’t pretend that the cumulative impact of these environmentally racist projects aren’t having a horrible [impact] on the people in our community.”
Electricity is not the only resource the massive supercomputer requires in huge amounts. According to Memphis Light Gas and Water, the facility consumes up to 1,000,000 gallons of water daily from the area’s water system to cool its servers.
Did xAI Breach Federal Law?
Residents claim minimal oversight and accountability from city officials in this part of Memphis are major factors attracting investors and industrialists like Musk.
The data center is the brain of xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, which will train a chatbot known as Grok with user data from X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter that the billionaire bought in 2022 for $44 billion.
Musk boasted to the world on X about setting up shop on Paul Lowery Rd. in Memphis, the site of a now-defunct Electrolux plant, in record time. He wrote of having “challah French toast for breakfast in Memphis,” but didn’t note the installation of 35 gas- powered turbines. Although natural gas is presented by many as a cleaner fossil fuel, during combustion, it emits methane and carbon dioxide, the two most climate-damaging greenhouse gases.
Methane, the primary component of natural gas, can trap 86 times more heat in the Earth’s atmosphere than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period.
“It’s a huge concern for our climate, and it’s a huge concern for the people who live nearby,” said Sharon Wilson, executive director of OilField Witness, a nonprofit focused on methane emission accountability.
In addition to methane, Wilson, a certified optical gas imaging expert, said gas turbines “emit particulate matter, CO2, formaldehyde and volatile organic compounds, including benzene, which is a known carcinogen, for which there is no safe level of exposure.”
Wilson said her recent study of the gas turbines at the data facility revealed “horrific amounts of pollution.”
In addition to the methane, the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) reported the turbines could emit over 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, further deteriorating the city’s air quality.
Section 165 of the Clean Air Act (CAA), a federal law regulating air emissions from stationary and mobile sources, mandates that major emitting facilities must obtain a Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit before construction.
“But he [Musk] didn’t bother to get that,” said Tracy O’Neill, decarbonization advocacy coordinator at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE).
Last month, the SELC, on behalf of the NAACP, announced it had sent xAI a notice of intent to sue the company if Musk does not discontinue the use of the turbines.
According to Patrick Anderson, an SELC senior attorney, xAI had earlier claimed to reporters that the facility has an “operational waiver” that permitted it to operate the turbines for 364 days without a permit. But, no legal framework within the Clean Air Act would allow xAI to install and operate “the big turbines” without a permit first, he said.
“Every single time I’ve ever seen turbines anywhere, they have an air permit,” Anderson said. “So we are confused because we have not seen a public notice, and we monitor the public notices.”
Permitting under the Clean Air Act requires public notifications and a comment period to ensure that residents who may be impacted have the opportunity to review, question and oppose developments that could harm their health or environment.
And even if xAI did have the waiver it claims, SELC has reported that satellite images of the facility using a thermal camera detected heat from the turbines in June 2024, indicating that they already exceeded the length of time the company claims the operational waiver allowed. Any grace period would have elapsed by now, Anderson said.
Local laws mirror federal laws, Anderson said, so xAI was also in violation of the Shelby County Implementation Plan that requires a new source of emissions to obtain preconstruction and operating permits.
Neither Shelby County environmental officials nor xAi responded to requests for comment.
Musk’s company could be fined up to $100,000 in liability for breaching the Clean Air Act if penalties for “illegal” actions were pursued, the attorney said. But for now, SELC is calling for injunctive relief for residents requiring xAI to stop the use of the turbines until an operational permit is obtained.
The company applied for a minor source permit in January 2025, for which a public notice and hearing were held earlier this year. More than 2,000 comments have been sent to the Shelby County Health Department by residents, most of them opposing the use of gas turbines to power the data center and insisting the company use renewable energy to power its plant.
The permit application was late and not for the correct type of permit, given the size, number of turbines and estimated emissions of pollutants, Anderson said, adding that xAI should have applied for a major source permit before installing and operating the data center.
“Their emissions are just too high to qualify as a minor source even though that’s what they’re trying to get,” Anderson said.
Bobby White, the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce’s chief government affairs officer, told Inside Climate News that only 15 turbines were operational at the xAI facility—a claim that Memphis Mayor Paul Young made previously.
Speaking about the campaigns to stop the use of the turbines, White described the effort as obstruction of “business continuity,” as other manufacturers, hospitals and businesses in industry utilize similar energy generating sources as xAI. However, all these emission sources have operated with appropriate permitting.
“Our organization doesn’t defend people—we defend projects,” White said.
As for neighbors of the xAI project not being notified about Colossus and the gas turbines feeding its colossal appetite for electricity, White said companies are not expected to allow residents to “check off” every step in the development of a facility that isn’t built using public funds.
“Confidentiality is a hallmark of economic development,” he said.
According to the chamber website, the data center will create about 500 high-paying jobs for Memphians. Currently, xAI has openings for 139 roles, 21 of them in Memphis, but information about how many people are already employed at the facility is not currently available.
Even with a 150 megawatt powerline already delivering power to Colossus and another 150 megawatts coming on line in the fall with the completion of a second substation for the facility, there is mounting worry that the supercomputer may require more turbine installations as Musk pursues his plans to expand it to 1,000,000 graphic processing units (GPUs).
To achieve its goal of growth, xAI has purchased a property for a second facility, a million-square-foot property on Tulane Road, near the JP Freeman Optional K-8 magnet school. It is yet to get an air quality permit for this new data center expansion facility, where it plans to begin operations of Colossus 2.
The new facility is connected to a pre-existing water line, but it is unclear how much water will be needed at this location, as operations have yet to commence.
In a press statement, the MLGW said xAI plans to build an $80 million gray water plant on another 13 acres of property that will reclaim an estimated 13 million gallons of water per day from the Maxson wastewater treatment plant.
The data center will use approximately 5 million gallons of the recycled water to cool its supercomputer at the new location; however, more energy may be required to power the second data hub. According to the local utility company, a 1.1-gigawatt power supply request from xAI will soon be finalized and submitted for consideration.
Favors for Allies?
The Tennessee region where xAI’s facility is located has not met EPA air quality standards since 2015.
Environmental activists at the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy have criticized President Donald Trump’s EPA for failing to designate the area as a nonattainment zone for national clean air standards, which would require the agency to enforce stricter regulations on new industries moving to these areas to prevent further deterioration of air quality.
In 2024, the Biden administration implemented emission standards for hazardous pollutants, including ethylene oxide that was emitted by the now-closed sterilization facility in Shelby County. However, under the current administration, EPA said it is reconsidering multiple National Emission Standards for Hazardous Air Pollutants, which it said are affecting a broad range of American industrial sectors. It is only one of the many environmental rules it wants to repeal.
“This current EPA administration seems to be very willing to grant waivers and leniency and not enforce certain laws,” said O’Neill, at SACE. The regional EPA office has been unresponsive or minimally responsive to requests by various organizations regarding xAI’s use of the turbines, she said.
Some residents and environmental activists believe EPA’s treatment of Colossus and its opponents is driven by who owns the project. “No one should be above the law,” said Amanda Garcia, a SELC senior attorney. “Regardless of the motivations of SCHD and EPA, it is Memphis communities who have been paying the price for xAI’s unpermitted pollution for the past year.”
Musk is reported to have provided nearly $300 million in support to Trump and Republican causes in 2024, and is the former leader of the Department of Government Efficiency that cut thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in expenditures from the government on behalf of the president’s administration.
While the relationship has been increasingly volatile, Musk’s role as one of Trump’s confidants has raised questions about the environmental exemptions from the federal government that the billionaire may push and profit from.
“EPA could override the state of Tennessee if they wanted to,” O’Neill said. “The bottom line is he’s polluting this community, and there’s little to zero oversight”.
However, it would be “pretty rare” for the EPA at the federal level to override the front-line regulators, said Anderson at SELC, since the agency prefers to let state and local agencies take the lead.
“EPA does not provide comments on matters related to potential or ongoing enforcement actions,” said Davina Marraccini, a public affairs director at EPA. In an email to Inside Climate News, Marraccini said the agency was working with the local health department to review the concerns that had been raised.
Stephen Smith, executive director of SACE, described Musk’s drive to construct the data center for an AI chatbot to compete with the likes of ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, as part of competition between tech CEOs and “the product of very large egos.”
It’s a distorted reflection of Silicon Valley’s mindset of moving fast and breaking things, he said.
“This is exactly what’s happening; Elon Musk and his company are moving very fast, and what they’re breaking is the trust and the health of a community that has already been significantly impacted by industrial development,” Smith said.