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The Trump administration is arguing that xAI should be allowed to continue using temporary, trailer-mounted gas-fired turbines to power its massive Colossus 2 data center in the Southeast because any delay in the development and training of the company’s Grok models would “directly [threaten] our ongoing national security interests.”
That’s according to the Justice Department’s intervention this week in a federal court case over whether those turbines — which xAI brought in last year to supplement its grid connection at the site — should be exempt from Clean Air Act permitting requirements.
The Department of War (formerly the Department of Defense) relies on xAI’s “Grok Gov” model for a range of military activities, the agency said in a filing, and offers features “that are found in no other frontier AI model.” During Operation Epic Fury, the initial strikes on Iran in early 2026 that kicked off a monthslong conflict that rattled global energy markets, xAI’s models enabled the U.S. to deploy more than 2,000 munitions to distinct targets within 96 hours, the filing continued. The agency uses almost 2 billion Grok tokens every day, it added — roughly the equivalent of 6 million pages of text being processed.
