The US government wants you to know that Elon Musk’s AI chatbot is apparently so vital to national defense that it justifies running dozens of unpermitted gas turbines in a Mississippi neighborhood.
The Department of Justice has intervened in a lawsuit filed by the NAACP against xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech, siding with the AI company’s continued operation of natural gas turbines that power its Colossus 2 data center in Southaven, Mississippi. The turbines lack Clean Air Act permits and pollution controls. The DOJ’s argument: the Pentagon needs Grok running on classified networks, and pulling the plug would compromise national security.
57 turbines, zero permits
The NAACP filed its lawsuit in April 2026, initially citing 27 unpermitted gas turbines at the facility. That number has since ballooned to 57.
To put that in perspective, 57 gas turbines generating hundreds of megawatts of power is roughly equivalent to a conventional power plant. Except conventional power plants go through years of environmental review before firing up. xAI apparently skipped that step.
