How 68 of xAI's turbines got into Mississippi with no permit

Okay. Memphis has been arguing about xAI’s gas turbines for two years now.

The xAI files

Every essay in this series is pinned to a question on the board at rachelandthecity.com/the-xai-files.

Here’s what I don’t think enough people know. That whole fight – the lawyers, the health department, the city council, a lawyer’s photographer flying over with a thermal camera – was about the turbines at Colossus 1, on Paul R. Lowry Road.

While that was going on, a much bigger power plant went up seven tenths of a mile from the second campus, on the other side of the state line. Over the past year, 68 gas turbines were brought in there. It went up without an air permit. Nobody in Mississippi got to fight about it before it was running, because there was nothing to fight – no application, no notice, no hearing.

And today Mississippi’s environmental agency told me it hasn’t been keeping track of any of it.

Let me back up, because the geography trips everybody.

The main data center campus is in Tennessee. The power plant that runs it is in Mississippi – 68 gas turbines brought onto Stanton Road in Southaven, just south of the state line. xAI told a federal judge in June that the turbines there – 59 of them at the time – were, right then, the “only available power source” for two campuses – the Tulane buildings in Tennessee and the Macroharder data center on Stateline Road in Mississippi.

So the gas burns in Mississippi, and it runs data centers on both sides of the line – the biggest one in Tennessee.

Now, how do you put 68 gas turbines somewhere without an air permit?

Well, it comes down to two words.

Mississippi normally makes you get two air permits for stuff that pollutes. One to build it, one to run it. But there’s a section in the rules called 2.13.D, and it lists fifteen things that don’t need either one. Home heating is on there, and so is yard equipment, and so is air conditioning. It’s a housekeeping list, so the state isn’t out there writing permits for lawn mowers.

Item three on that list says this – “Mobile sources.”

That’s it – that’s the whole thing. The rule never says what a mobile source even is. There’s no meaning given for it anywhere in that section, there’s no time limit on it, and the words “portable” and “temporary” don’t show up at all.

I am assuming that those rules were written for cars and buses.

On July 25th of 2025, xAI wrote to MDEQ – that’s the state’s environmental agency – to say it was bringing temporary turbines on site before it had an air permit, and asked the agency to agree that was allowed. Four days later the agency wrote back that the turbines were exempt as mobile sources, on two conditions it wrote into its own letter, based on what xAI had told it. Each machine had to stay bolted to a flatbed trailer, and each one had to be meant to sit there less than twelve months.

So that gave xAI a whole lotta leeway – no permit to build and no permit to run.

And that is the whole reason it popped up out of nowhere.

Think about what a permit actually does. Somebody files an application, and it’s public. The state has to give notice. People get a comment period. There’s a hearing. That’s how you find out something is coming.

None of that happened here, because none of it was required.

Now put the two timelines side by side.

The Memphis fight over Colossus 1 started in August of 2024, when lawyers for the neighbors wrote to the Shelby County Health Department about turbines running with no permit. By February of 2025 the company had filed its permit application, the county had a draft permit ready to send out for public notice, and the city council was taking public comment on xAI. That’s the Memphis side.

While the fight over the turbines at Colossus 1 was happening in public, behind closed doors, on February 28th of 2025, an engineer at Trinity Consultants wrote to MDEQ asking for air emissions data. Trinity is the firm that later put together the Mississippi permit application for the permanent plant. Here’s how he described the job.

“We’ve been asked to model air emissions for a potential facility in Shelby County, TN (just over the state line).”

Shelby County is Memphis. He gave coordinates and asked for everything inside a 60 kilometer radius – and that radius tells you what he was modeling. You don’t run 60 kilometers of air modeling for trailer turbines. You run it for a permanent power plant that needs a real permit. A week later Mississippi sent him back a spreadsheet named for a Shelby County, Tennessee site.

I’m going to get to that Tennessee modeling in another essay – it deserves its own.

Anyway, three weeks after that, Trinity sent out the modeling plan for that permanent plant. It was 1.56 gigawatts, and it was on the Tennessee side, at the Tulane campus. The Shelby County Health Department circulated it to two reviewers at EPA, two at the National Park Service, USDA and Tennessee’s environment agency. That’s the process working the way it’s supposed to.

The review window closed April 20th. Then the Tennessee plan went away. In May the Chamber of Commerce said xAI had no plans for gas turbines at Tulane.

And on April 28th – a week after that window closed – the head of the Mississippi Development Authority set up a call with MDEQ’s executive director. Subject line: “Call with Xai on expansion plans.”

In June, Trinity asked MDEQ for a “confidential meeting” about the project.

And in the June meeting request and the stormwater records, nobody calls it xAI. MDEQ’s own record for it is the “Duke Facility,” after the old Duke Energy plant on the site. The stormwater documents call it “Project Duke.”

On July 16th, the company bought the old Duke Energy plant site on Stanton Road. The deed says it paid “ten dollars … and other good and valuable consideration.” That’s the standard way to record a land sale without saying the real price, and Mississippi doesn’t make you say it.

Then, on July 25th, xAI sent MDEQ that email I described earlier – saying it was bringing temporary turbines on site before it had a permit, and asking the agency to agree that was allowed. On July 29th the state said yes. On August 1st the first temporary turbines rolled onto the site. Three weeks later, on August 21st, Trinity filed the permit application for the permanent plant – the same plant it had been modeling for Tennessee back in February, now on the Mississippi side of the line.

So the permanent plant moved states. The temporary turbines are how you keep the lights on while the permanent one gets built – and they’re the part the state said needed no air permit at all.

And while all of that was happening quietly in Mississippi, Memphis was doing Colossus 1 the loud way. The draft permit went out for public notice. The lawyers filed objections. The county answered them in writing on June 2nd and issued the permit on July 2nd, for 15 permanent turbines. All of it was public, and all of it happened before the permit.

Mississippi got its fight too – hundreds of people at a hearing this past February, a federal lawsuit, a noise class action, a coalition with a petition. But look at when. The first turbines started running in August of 2025. Tracy Thornton, who lives nearby, swore in court that he found out the plant existed when he saw a sign at Tulane and Stateline, after the machines were already going. Jason Haley thought a neighbor had left a leaf blower running. Krystal Polk’s family has had the land across the road for four generations. The dormant plant facing it, in her words, “suddenly came to life.”

Memphis found out because of the air. Mississippi found out from the noise.

On August 10th of this year, MDEQ sent xAI two Notices of Violation. One was about the west parcel next to the plant – the old city training site. An inspector found more than 16 acres already torn up with no stormwater coverage, plus “significant dust impacts with inadequate control.” The second was the Macroharder site over on Stateline Road, where the inspector found a cooling tower and security fencing already standing. Both notices warn of a maximum penalty of $25,000 per violation per day.

And one of them cites Mississippi’s air rules – the part that says nobody gets to let particles go airborne in a way that’s a nuisance or hurts people.

So this is an agency that will write you up for dust on a construction site but said 68 gas turbines needed no air permit at all.

The difference isn’t that MDEQ doesn’t enforce. It’s that dust on a construction site has a rule with a trigger in it, and “mobile sources” doesn’t.

Which brings me to the twelve months, and this part matters more than it sounds.

That twelve-month limit isn’t in the rule. MDEQ added it in its own letter – and the letter says it was going on what xAI told it. The rule as written has no time limit at all – nothing in its words says those turbines ever have to leave. So, the twelve months came from the agency, not the rule.

But the twelve months doesn’t run on the power plant. It runs on each turbine.

When the agency and the company signed an agreed order this past July, the removal schedule inside it mostly worked that same rule out one machine at a time. Most retirement dates land exactly one year less a day after the day that machine showed up. Not all of them – the state let 13 of the 14 turbines of one model run to December 31st, 17 months for the first ones, and in September it let two more machines from August 2025 run until May 2027.

The first turbines arrived August 1st of 2025. More kept coming, a few at a time, right through the next summer, until there were 68 of them by July of 2026. Every new machine started its own twelve months the day it got there. Run that out and the last ones don’t have to leave until July of 2027.

So, while the sell is that turbines can run for up to 12 months without a permit – they actually figured out a way to run the turbines for up to two years without one.

The other half of the test is even easier. A machine counts as mobile because it’s bolted to a trailer and could be moved. And there’s nothing in 2.13.D about swapping – pull one out, drop a fresh one in its spot, and nothing in that section says the clock keeps running.

So back on July 29th, I asked MDEQ for the serial numbers on those machines, and for whatever the agency keeps to track that twelve-month clock.

The answer came back today. It’s from Jaricus Whitlock, MDEQ’s Air Division Chief – the same man who signed the letter that created the twelve-month condition in the first place. He went through my list item by item.

Any records tracking the twelve months, by unit or by group or by site? “There are no such records for this request item.”

Any records on how MDEQ would decide whether a replacement unit starts a fresh twelve months? “There are no such records for this request item.”

Serial numbers? His words are that information “will not be found.”

Any inspection or site visit since August 1st – the month the first turbines came due to leave? “To date, MDEQ has not performed any such inspection / site visit so no such record is available.”

I asked what the agency has behind that July agreement too – how the removal schedule gets checked, what air quality work it leaned on before signing. Same answer both times.

There are no such records.

Now put one more thing beside that. On August 31st, xAI announced it had powered down eleven of the 68.

Eleven is exactly the number the agreed order called for in August. I guess they did it – maybe – it was reported in the papers – but the company’s word was “powered down,” the order is about machines coming off the site, and that’s not what they said they did.

So the company says eleven are down. The agency that would check told me it hadn’t been out there since August 1st. And MDEQ says a serial number for any of them won’t be found in its files.

Here’s where all of it lands.

The turbines were always temporary in name only. On March 11th of this year, MDEQ issued a real Clean Air Act permit for 41 permanent turbines – a 1.2 gigawatt power plant. That permit came three weeks after a public hearing where hundreds of people showed up, and NBC News reported that not one person in the room spoke in favor of it.

So the machines coming out under the twelve-month rule are getting replaced by permanent ones. Permanent power was always the point.

And Southaven, for its part, has no rules written just for data centers – its planning director told the aldermen they’re allowed by right under the city’s industrial zoning.

I keep coming back to how quiet all of it was. Memphis fought about the turbines it could see, and it took lawyers and hearings and a thermal camera to do it. Mississippi got a bigger plant off one email, with no application, no notice and no hearing – and the agency that said yes told me it hadn’t been out to look at it.

That’s not a loophole somebody found. That’s just how the rule reads.

And it’s still sitting there, exactly the way it was.

I said when I started this investigation that I would report back if xAI broke any rules – but from what I’ve been able to find – there aren’t really many rules to break.

Every record this essay is built on is on its own page, and ten of them are hosted there because they exist nowhere else: the records behind this essay.

If you like facts-first info on all this, consider leaving a tip on Venmo or PayPal – this stuff takes a lot of time to put together. And check out everything I’ve written with citations and receipts at the xAI Files.

Sources

Correction, September 26, 2026: This essay first said 69 turbines, the count in the state’s July order and xAI’s announcement. The state’s amended order of September 11 says one of them never arrived, so 68 reached Southaven.

Update, September 27th, 2026: Mississippi’s environmental agency told me on September 15th it had done no inspection or site visit since August 1st. Its own records show it inspected the site on September 14th, the day before this essay ran. Those lines now say what the agency told me.

Correction, September 27th, 2026: This essay first said xAI’s July 25th, 2025 email asked MDEQ whether its turbines counted as mobile sources – the email told the agency it was bringing temporary turbines on site before it had a permit and asked the agency to agree. It said the permit application was filed in July – it was filed August 21st, three weeks after the turbines arrived. It said every retirement date falls a year less a day after arrival – the state gave 13 of the 14 turbines of one model until December 31st and two more until May 2027. And it said nobody in MDEQ’s files calls the company xAI – some of them do.

Update, September 27th, 2026: Lines about what needed a permit now say it was the state’s call, the deed quote now shows where words were left out, and the permit source line now names the appeal it links to.

Correction, October 12th, 2026: This essay called the data center on Stateline Road “Macrohard” in two places. Its sign reads Macroharder – Macrohard is the building on Tulane Road.

Everything I have written about AI is in one place at rachelandthecity.com/the-ai-files.

The xAI files

Sources

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