The US Department of Justice has asked a federal court to throw out a Clean Air Act lawsuit against Elon Musk’s xAI, arguing that the company’s unpermitted gas turbines near Memphis are a matter of “national, economic, and energy security.”
The move puts the Trump administration in court alongside Musk to defend dozens of methane-burning turbines that have been running without air permits in one of the most polluted regions of the country.
What the lawsuit is about
The NAACP, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, sued xAI in April under the federal Clean Air Act. The suit alleges the company is running dozens of gas turbines without the required permits or pollution controls to power its Colossus and Colossus 2 data centers, which train and run Grok, Musk’s AI chatbot, and also now sells compute to Anthropic and Google.
The turbines sit in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line from the Colossus site in South Memphis, Tennessee. xAI claims the units are exempt from Mississippi air-permitting rules because they are mounted on trailers and classified as “temporary” mobile equipment. The SELC counters that federal law treats trailer-mounted turbines as stationary sources subject to regulation.
