Despite Protests, Elon Musk Secures Air Permit for xAI

A local health department in Memphis has granted Elon Musk’s xAI data center an air permit to continue operating the gas turbines that power the company’s Grok chatbot. The permit comes amid widespread community opposition and a looming lawsuit alleging the company violated the Clean Air Act.

The Shelby County Health Department released an air permit for the xAI project Wednesday, after receiving hundreds of public comments. The news was first reported by the Daily Memphian.

In June, the Memphis Chamber of Commerce announced that xAI had chosen a site in Memphis to build its new supercomputer. The company’s website boasts that it was able to build the supercomputer, Colossus, in just 122 days. That speed was due in part to the mobile gas turbines the company quickly began installing at the campus, the site of a former manufacturing facility.

Colossus allowed xAI to quickly catch up to rivals OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic in building cutting-edge artificial intelligence. It was built using 100,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs, making it likely the world’s largest supercomputer.

xAI’s Memphis campus is located in a predominantly Black community known as Boxtown which has been historically burdened with industrial projects that cause pollution. Gas turbines like the ones xAI is using in Memphis can be a significant source of harmful emissions, like nitrogen oxides, which create smog. Memphis already has some of the highest child asthma rates in Tennessee. Since xAI began running its turbines, residents have repeatedly met and rallied against the project.

“I am horrified but not surprised,” says KeShaun Pearson, the leader of Memphis Community Against Pollution. “The flagrant violation of the Clean Air Act and the disregard for our human right to clean air, by xAI’s burning of illegal methane turbines, has been stamped as permissible by the Shelby County Health Department. Over 1,000 people submitted public comments demanding protection and got passed over for a billionaire’s ambitious experiment.”

Under the Clean Air Act, “major” sources of emissions—like a cluster of gas turbines—need a permit, known as a Prevention of Significant Deterioration (PSD) permit. However, Shelby County Health Department officials told local reporters in August that this wasn’t necessary for xAI since its turbines weren’t designed to be permanent. Amid mounting local opposition, xAI finally applied for a permit with the Shelby County Health Department in January, months after it first began running the turbines.

Last month, the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) announced that they intended to sue xAI for allegedly violating the Clean Air Act.

“The decision to give xAI an air permit for its polluting gas turbines flies in the face of the hundreds of Memphians who spoke out against the company’s permit request,” said SELC senior attorney Amanda Garcia in a press release. “Instead of confronting long-standing air pollution problems in South Memphis, the Shelby County Health Department is turning a blind eye to obvious Clean Air Act violations in order to allow another polluter to set up shop in this already-overburdened community without appropriate protections.”

The new permit from the health department allows the company to operate 15 turbines on the site until 2027. In June, Memphis mayor Paul Young wrote an op-ed in the Tennessee Commercial Appeal that noted xAI was currently operating 21 turbines. SELC says that aerial footage it took in April, however, showed as many as 35 turbines operating at the site.

xAI did not immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment, including questions about how many turbines it is currently operating at the facility. Shelby County did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

When asked if it would continue with the lawsuit, SELC said it was “evaluating [its] options.” Activists signaled that they were ready to contest the decision. “The people are awake and ready to fight back,” Pearson told WIRED. “You can expect to see an appeal!”

In May, Sharon Wilson, a certified optical gas imaging thermographer, traveled to Memphis to film emissions from the site with a special optical gas imaging camera that records usually invisible emissions. Wilson tracks leaks from facilities in the Permian Basin, one of the world’s most prolific oil- and gas-producing regions, in Texas. She alleged to WIRED that what she saw in Memphis was one of the densest clouds of emissions she’d ever seen.

“I expected to see the typical power plant type of pollution that I see,” she says. “What I saw was way worse than what I expected.”