Dive Brief:
- A Clean Air Act lawsuit over xAI’s operation of a gas-fired power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, threatens U.S. national security interests, a Department of Defense official said in testimony supporting the Department of Justice’s request to be allowed to intervene in the case. DOJ wants the case dismissed.
- “The plaintiffs in this civil action seek to enjoin xAI's use of temporary gas-fired turbines at its Stanton Road site that powers the nearby Colossus 2 data center or supercomputer — xAI uses the Colossus 2 supercomputer to train and upgrade its Grok models, including ones used by [DOD],” said DOD’s Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Officer Cameron Stanley in the court filing. “xAI's Grok represents one of only four proprietary state-of-the-art (“frontier”) AI currently capable of supporting national security applications.”
- The lawsuit was filed in April by the NAACP against xAI and MZX Tech, its energy infrastructure and real estate subsidiary. The NAACP said the companies were violating the Clean Air Act by operating 27 gas turbines, totaling 495 MW, without an air permit at the site, which is on the Tennessee border south of Memphis.
Dive Insight:
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality said in July that the plant was protected by the Clean Air Act’s mobile source provisions as the turbines are portable units. The NAACP has argued against this and seeks federal relief from the state’s decision, alleging that pollution from the turbines “on top of the already high levels of ozone and NOx pollution [in] the greater Memphis area” will have negative health effects locally.
In May, the NAACP requested a preliminary injunction against the continued operation of the turbines.
Stanley argued that if the Colossus 2 data center were shut down due to a lack of power from the Stanton Road site, “xAI would lose capacity to train and develop future, improved versions of Grok. And if xAI is hindered from continuing to improve and upgrade Grok, including the Grok Gov Model, [DOD’s] ability to meet its national security mission and keep pace with adversaries will be impaired.”
“The Grok Gov Model offers features unique to xAI that are found in no other frontier AI model,” Stanley said. He cited Grok Gov’s integration into Maven Smart System, an AI-powered command-and-control platform, and revealed that Grok was used in the Iran war.
Grok’s integration with MSS “enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours during Operation Epic Fury, a testament to the greatly increased operational efficiency made possible by the Grok Gov Model,” he said.
Stanley said that in the modern theater of operations, “data center inference capacity must be recognized not merely as commercial infrastructure, but as a long-term strategic tool vital to maintaining our technological advantage against adversaries.”
The DOJ also included a letter from Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, R, who wrote that the NAACP is “seeking to materially slow or outright stop the largest private investment in Mississippi's history — an investment that already has created thousands of construction jobs and will create hundreds of long-term high paying jobs.”
In a Wednesday release, the Environmental Protection Network said the DOJ’s filing “goes far beyond a single data center” and amounts to the DOJ “asking a federal court to grant the Executive Branch a sweeping ‘veto power’ to shut down congressionally authorized citizen lawsuits whenever community enforcement conflicts with the administration’s political priorities.”
“The administration is deploying this sweeping legal theory in service of its AI and data center agenda,” EPN wrote. “EPA has made AI and data center expansion one of its defining priorities, including efforts to speed permitting and power generation for data centers, while moving to weaken pollution standards for coal and gas power plants at the same time data centers are driving new electricity demand.”
