The fight over who gets poisoned so Silicon Valley can train smarter chatbots has landed in federal court. 

The NAACP is suing Elon Musk’s xAI for allegedly skirting permits and running gas turbines that are spewing formaldehyde and smog‑forming pollution into Black communities already scoring failing grades for air quality.

To keep its “Colossus” data centers running, xAI is burning enough methane to power a small city — and, according to the lawsuit from the NAACP, doing it through a web of gas turbines that advocates say were first operated without permits and then rubber‑stamped by regulators over residents’ objections.

The lawsuit, filed Tuesday in a federal court in Mississippi, alleges that between August and December 2025, xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech LLC, installed and operated 27 gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi — a suburb of Memphis, Tennessee — “without an air permit or regard for the health and safety of people living nearby.” 

The plant feeds xAI’s Colossus 2 data center complex serving the Memphis area, where Black residents have been organizing for years to rein in a growing cluster of data facilities they say are threatening their health.

“A data center should not be a potential death sentence for a community’s health,” said Abre’ Conner, NAACP director of environmental and climate justice. “Our homes, churches, and playgrounds will not be sacrifice zones for Big Tech’s convenience.”

The showdown in the Memphis area comes as data centers are rapidly reshaping the physical map of the AI economy nationwide. Pew Research Center found that two-thirds of new U.S. data centers are now being built in rural areas, concentrating massive energy and water demands — and their pollution — in small communities that often lack the staff, infrastructure, and political leverage to negotiate with tech giants on equal terms. While industry boosters tout tax revenue and a handful of jobs, a growing body of research shows that data centers are frequently placed in Black and low-income areas already facing high environmental burdens.

Roughly half of all data centers being built are in the South. And as the construction of these facilities grows, more than 40% of the U.S. now lives within a few miles of an existing or planned data center.

At a community event last year, resident LaTricea Adams said even before Musk’s computer arrived, living in the 38109 ZIP code — where one of the facilities is located — has already negatively impacted the health of Black residents. 

“Living in this ZIP code has been a death sentence for Black Memphians,” said Adams, the founder of a national Black environmental group called Young, Gifted & Green.

The power plant operated by Musk’s xAI in Mississippi is expected to emit more than 1,700 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides each year. That makes the facility the largest industrial source of nitrogen oxides in the greater Memphis area, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, Earthjustice, and the NAACP. The turbines also have the potential to release up to 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde each year, according to the suit. Combined, these pollutants are linked to increases in respiratory illnesses and cancer cases.

The neighborhoods around these facilities already have a cancer risk that is four times the national average.

“xAI has been pumping illegal pollution into this community in its rush to power the ‘Colossus 2’ data center. No company – and no industry – has a free license to pollute our air,” said Laura Thoms, the director of enforcement for Earthjustice.

The NAACP is seeking injunctive relief and civil penalties, and for Musk’s company to stop operating the turbines at its Southaven facility and to install the best available control technology on the power plant.

“We cannot afford to normalize this kind of environmental injustice — where billion-dollar companies set up polluting operations in Black neighborhoods without any permits and think they’ll get away with it because the people don’t have the power to fight back,” NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson said in a statement last year.

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Adam Mahoney is the climate and environment reporter at Capital B. He can be reached by email at adam.mahoney@capitalbnews.org, on Bluesky, and on X at @AdamLMahoney.