SOUTHAVEN, Miss.—Over the last three years, Devan Jenkins has watched the trees around her family home give way to industrial development.
Directly in front of her property along the Mississippi-Tennessee border sits a tangle of massive power lines, an extension of the electrical grid operated by Memphis Light, Gas and Water.
At the end of her street, a few hundred yards away from her bedroom, sprawls Colossus 2, the second data center built by Elon Musk’s company xAI to power his controversial AI chatbot, Grok. And less than two miles across the state line in Southaven, Mississippi, is an xAI-owned energy plant with over two-dozen towering gas turbines.
The arrival of the turbines last summer has disrupted daily life on Jenkins’ property, filling the air with a deep, persistent drone that seeps through walls and windows and permeates the house she shares with her grandparents. The sound continues through the day and often intensifies at night, she told the Mississippi Free Press, making it hard to think clearly and even harder to fall asleep.
“You can feel it rattling your eardrums,” said Jenkins, who lives in Memphis’ Whitehaven neighborhood but considers herself part of the greater Southaven, Mississippi, community. “It makes you feel like you’re going insane.”
Jenkins is one of many area residents who oppose xAI’s growing presence in their backyards, fearing what its operations could mean for their health and the surrounding environment. At a public hearing in Southaven last month, hundreds of community members and allies denounced the company’s practices, accusing it of violating federal law and recklessly endangering public safety.
The Feb. 17 hearing, hosted by the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, centered on a proposed permit that would allow xAI affiliate MZX Tech to install over 40 permanent gas turbines at its recently acquired Southaven plant. Those machines would replace the so-called temporary turbines currently housed at the facility, which have operated without permits for the better part of a year.
The fate of the permit now rests in the hands of the Mississippi Environmental Quality Permit Board, the regulatory body responsible for issuing, denying or modifying permits administered under the Clean Air Act. The board is set to consider the permit at a public meeting in Jackson on Tuesday, March 10.
Though the proposed permit drew unanimous opposition at the Southaven public hearing, some residents worry that xAI will still get its way.
“It seems to me that we are being very thoroughly thrown under the bus,” said Angie Davis, a former choir director who moved from Memphis to Southaven three decades ago. Her daughter and granddaughter live in the neighborhood next to the unpermitted gas turbines, she explained, and she believes the location of the engines—and xAI’s broader incursion into Southaven—was no accident.
“I don’t think it would have been done if the powers that be thought we could fight back.”
A Familiar Pattern
xAI’s activities in Memphis and subsequent push into Mississippi have been controversial, even by data center standards. To get its inaugural data center, Colossus 1, up and running as swiftly as possible, the company relied on unpermitted combustion turbines powered by methane gas, installing as many as 35 of the machines in Memphis’ Boxtown neighborhood.
The move sparked widespread backlash and sustained protest from residents, leading xAI to obtain permits for some of those turbines last summer.
xAI has followed the same blueprint for Colossus 2 in Whitehaven, placing up to 27 unpermitted turbines at a nearby facility in Southaven and using them to meet the data center’s energy needs while construction is still ongoing. The company plans to build a third data center in Southaven, but has yet to reveal how the facility will be powered.
In addition to their constant noise, methane gas turbines emit an array of harmful air pollutants, including highly reactive gases known as nitrogen oxides that contribute to respiratory and cardiovascular illnesses. They also release particulate matter—a mix of airborne particles and droplets found to worsen asthma and other chronic conditions—and formaldehyde, a known carcinogen.
Despite these public health risks, MDEQ has allowed xAI to forgo permits for the turbines currently housed at the Southaven plant, claiming that federal rules exempt turbines classified as “temporary-mobile” engines from requiring permits for up to a year. The absence of permits means that xAI has been free to operate the machines without set emissions limits or pollution controls since August 2025.
“(xAI) has a long and sordid history of running their temporary turbines well before permissions were in place for them to do so,” Charly Park, an area resident and member of a local coalition opposing the xAI plant, said at the public hearing on Feb. 17. “They did it in Memphis, and as expected, they did it again in Southaven.”
On Jan. 15, the Environmental Protection Agency updated pollution control standards for gas turbines under the Clean Air Act, including language that environmental groups say affirms that temporary gas turbines do require permits. The update puts xAI’s Southaven turbines at odds with federal law, the groups allege, opening the door to legal challenges like the one announced by the NAACP on Feb. 13.
“Federal law supersedes state statute,” LaTricea Adams, founder and president of the nonprofit Young, Gifted and Green, said at the Feb. 17 public hearing. “The Clean Air Act is not optional, but somehow xAI is still actively breaking the law.”
The Mississippi Free Press reached out to xAI multiple times for comment, but did not hear back by press time.
MDEQ, meanwhile, maintains that the EPA’s new standards do not explicitly impose permitting requirements on temporary turbines like the ones located in Southaven.
“There are federal regulations that outright mandate that a (pollution) source get an air permit,” MDEQ Air Division Chief Jaricus Whitlock said in a Feb. 24 interview. “We have seen no such language … in this new turbine rule.”
New Permit, Same Power Source
To supply long-term power to its Colossus 2 data center, xAI has requested a permit from MDEQ that would authorize the siting of 41 permanent gas turbines at its Southaven plant. The installation would create a “behind-the-meter” electrical plant with a power generation capacity of about 1.2 gigawatts—more than half the maximum output of the Hoover Dam.
Because emissions at the site would exceed certain regulatory thresholds, xAI’s plant would be subject to various Clean Air Act requirements, like equipping its turbines with various control technologies to curtail harmful releases.
Plant operators would also have to conduct an analysis showing that facility emissions would not cause or contribute to violations of ambient air quality standards.
“By adhering to the emission limitation operational restrictions and compliance assurance mechanisms incorporated into the (draft permit), the proposed facility can comply with all applicable Mississippi and federal environmental laws, regulations and air quality standards,” MDEQ’s Jaricus Whitlock stated at the start of the Feb. 17 public hearing in Southaven.
Meeting attendees countered that the proposed permit would add hundreds of tons of pollution to an area already experiencing poor air quality. Last year, DeSoto County, Mississippi, and Shelby County, Tennessee, both received an “F” rating from the American Lung Association for ozone pollution, multiple residents pointed out, and the requested turbines would introduce new contaminants on either side of the state line.
“Bottom line, it’s an unprecedented amount of air pollution, and it’s scary,” said Lauren Van, a resident of Walls, Mississippi, living about four miles away from the xAI power plant. “We all breathe the same air, and the pollution is not isolated to Southaven.”
Other participants warned that the permit would have lasting consequences for public health, noting that their families are already feeling the effects of the unpermitted turbines at the facility.
“Breathing has become more difficult than it should ever be. This is not an inconvenience—this is a health crisis inside my own home,” said Chestela Farmer, a Southaven resident and mother who lives in the neighborhood next to the xAI plant. “No parents should have to watch their child struggle to breathe and wonder if the air around them is the cause.”
With xAI continuing to run its temporary turbines and expanding its footprint in Southaven, public hearing attendees urged regulators to prioritize people over industry and avoid bringing more pollution into the area.
“The people of Southaven are not collateral damage,” emphasized Rodney Paullus, a Southaven resident and medical professional. “We are not expendable.”
An Outside Warning
Public hearing participants had more than lived experience to point to when describing the draft permit’s potential impacts. A day before the meeting in Southaven, the Southern Environmental Law Center shared an independent study documenting far-reaching environmental and public health harms from xAI’s proposed power generation facility.
Led by a scientist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, the study found that installing 41 turbines at the xAI plant would dramatically increase particulate matter pollution in the Memphis metro area. Researchers calculated that this spike would translate to up to $44 million in estimated health damages each year—a figure that reflects expenses from premature deaths, hospital visits, lost productivity and other factors.
“We hear a lot about economic advantages when a developer (like xAI) comes to town, but when you look at a report like this, you see the health costs,” Elizabeth Putfark, an associate attorney at SELC, told the Mississippi Free Press. “One of the topline takeaways from the report is that this amount of increase in pollution … would correspond to about three more deaths per 100,000 people every year.”
The study found that while DeSoto County as a whole would see the biggest particulate matter increase under the proposed permit, exposure would be most pronounced in South Memphis neighborhoods, which are disproportionately Black and already overburdened with chronic illness. These include areas like Westwood and Westhaven, where Devan Jenkins’ family has lived for five generations.
“This is a clear-cut case of environmental racism,” Tennessee State Rep. Justin J. Pearson, who fought against the use of unpermitted turbines in Boxtown and whose district encompasses Westwood and Whitehaven (and who is one of the “Tennessee Three”), told the Mississippi Free Press in a Feb. 24 interview. “Communities that have been historically polluted are consistently being polluted by new entrants and new corporations—that’s the playbook that they’re following.”
Jenkins said she had reasons for optimism after attending last month’s public hearing. She encouraged nearby residents to continue opposing the xAI permit and take steps to support the natural world, like planting native trees and vegetation and leaving out food for local birds.
“I feel like we really can do something if we just keep going for it,” she concluded. “I doubt they will listen to us just after one meeting, but we can keep rallying together.”
The Mississippi Environmental Quality Permit Board will decide on the proposed permit during its monthly public meeting on Tuesday, March 10. The meeting will take place at 9 a.m. at 515 East Amite Street, Jackson, MS 39201.
Read more coverage of North Mississippi here.
Correction: This story originally misspelled Lauren Van’s and Rodney Paullus’ last names. We apologize for the error.
