Frank Pallone is demanding emissions data and a site visit over the gas turbines powering xAI’s Colossus supercomputers, near mostly Black communities in Tennessee and Mississippi.
The top Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee is demanding that Elon Musk account for the pollution from xAI’s data centres, escalating a fight over the gas turbines that power the company’s supercomputers.
Frank Pallone sent the letter on 29 July, seeking emissions data, permitting records, and access for committee staff to visit the sites.
The facilities in question are xAI’s Colossus clusters. The Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 sites, in Tennessee and Mississippi, house some of the largest AI training systems in the world, and they run on natural gas turbines installed to feed a power appetite the grid could not meet quickly enough.
The scale is enormous. Colossus was built at record speed to train Grok, xAI’s answer to ChatGPT, and its hunger for electricity and cooling water has made it a case study in what frontier AI now demands of a local grid.
