The turbine industry told EPA xAI's turbines need permits

I’ll shorthand this for the people who don’t want to read the entire thing – my finding is that xAI is at fault over using gas turbines without permits – and they always knew this – but this leads to a conclusion that many people will be very disappointed in.

The xAI files

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

I just received a new folder of records from the EPA – and there’s something in it that I have not seen anyone else connect the dots on. The companies that build and rent out portable gas turbines told the feds something simple – machines like the ones at xAI’s sites need air permits.

Shelby County told Memphis they don’t. Mississippi told its own permit board the same thing.

They can’t both be right. And it’s the gas turbine industry’s own lawyer who said they need one – in writing.

So, let me back up and explain the whole thing. This is pretty much the decision that all of the lawsuits revolve around. And the fight seems to be about how these gas turbines are viewed.

A “stationary source” is something that sits in one spot and pollutes – think of a factory. You need an air permit before you build one.

A “nonroad engine” moves around – think of a generator on a job site – and that kind doesn’t need a permit.

xAI’s turbines sit on trailers. So which are they?

Shelby County answered that on June 9th, 2025. It told EPA’s enforcement staff, in writing, that the turbines on site are temporary “nonroad engines,” not “stationary sources.”

Mississippi said the same thing to its own permit board on March 10th, 2026. Jaricus Whitlock runs the state’s air division. He told the board the 27 portable turbines at Southaven are “mobile sources” that state rules let off the hook. They “are not part of the proposed project under consideration.” I think what he is referring to is the power plant that’s being built across the state line from Colossus II.

So, that’s two governments in two states – and they landed on the same answer. But, the whole time they were saying that, the companies that build these machines were telling Washington the opposite.

On December 8th, 2025, a group called the Coalition of Mobile Electric Turbine Users asked EPA to rewrite the rules. They go by COMET. They wanted portable turbines to count as nonroad engines.

You don’t ask to change a rule if it already says what you want.

And they spelled out what it says now – that portable turbines are a stationary source under the rules we have – that’s what their petition says. That means they “trigger state stationary source permitting programs” that portable engines don’t have to deal with.

Eleven pages later, it says those programs “require preconstruction approval.”

That means you get the permit before you build the thing.

That’s the part that stopped me – their own lawyer wrote it down and sent it to the head of EPA.

As you may know from my previous essays – Memphis permitted 15 turbines at Colossus 1 for good. BUT – according to Doug McGowen, the president and CEO of MLGW – at a Memphis City Council meeting on September 1st – they still have portable turbines that will be removed when the rest of their power from the utility company comes online.

So – that leads me to believe that they still have unpermitted turbines running at Colossus I.

Southaven’s permit from March covers 41 permanent turbines at a plant that’s still being built. They are supposed to be installed at a power plant across the street from Colossus II. Right now they have portable gas turbines running on that site.

The portable ones running in Southaven weren’t in that permit at all. There were 27 of them when Whitlock talked to the board. By this summer the state’s own list ran to 69.

Except it didn’t. Mississippi amended that order on September 11th, and the amendment says Turbine 53 was never delivered. So the real number is 68.

That same amendment marks eleven of them retired. Which leaves 57 still out there. The newest ones arrived over the summer, and under the current order the last one doesn’t have to be gone until next summer.

COMET’s website doesn’t tell you much. There’s a mission statement and a phone number, and that’s about it. No officers are listed and no members are listed.

The people behind the petition are easier to see, though. Geoff Bland signs the petition as Chair of the Steering Committee, and he gives his employer as Life Cycle Power. He’d already made the same case under his own byline in an oil and gas trade magazine in July of 2025.

COMET’s letterhead prints an address and a phone number, and both belong to Life Cycle Power – same suite in Jersey Village, Texas, same phone line.

Ten names signed on as supporters – eight companies and two trade groups.

Life Cycle Power supplies the M35 – one of the units that ran at Southaven with no permit.

Solaris Energy Infrastructure supplies a turbine at Colossus 1. The Southern Environmental Law Center – everybody calls them SELC – counted it as one of the unpermitted ones.

Mitsubishi Power Aero’s spec sheet is bound right into the Southaven permit exhibits.

Trinity Consultants wrote the technical part of the petition – the part that compares turbine pollution to engine pollution.

Trinity is also xAI’s air permit firm. It wrote the Colossus 1 application. It wrote the modeling plan for Tulane Road. It wrote the Southaven permit application too.

So the firm that writes xAI’s permit applications also did the pollution math for a petition asking EPA to stop requiring those permits.

What does that mean? They had to have known that these gas turbines needed to be permitted under EPA’s rules. And if they knew – how could xAI, as their client, not know?

COMET wrote new wording for EPA to adopt. Their version still keeps a twelve-month limit – a portable turbine can’t sit in one spot longer than a year.

It adds a duty to give 30 days notice before a unit hits that year – but that notice goes to the turbine’s owner and the company running the site, not to any agency. And if you park a unit and start it up again in the same spot, every day it sat there counts after all.

Mississippi put a twelve-month condition on xAI’s turbines too, back in July of 2025. On September 15th, the state told me it keeps no records tracking those twelve months. Not by unit, not by group, not by site. And it said the serial numbers won’t be found in its files either.

I also asked whether anybody had been out to look since August 1st. The state told me it had performed no inspection or site visit, so there was no such record.

Now here’s where I have to correct myself, and I’d rather do it in the essay than quietly.

When I first published this, I wrote that nobody had been out to look since August 1st. That’s what the state told me on September 15th. But Mississippi’s own inspectors had been on that site the day before.

I know because xAI’s consultant put it in writing. On September 15th they sent MDEQ a correction saying the agency inspected on September 14th – and that during that visit, two turbines a compliance report had already called “retired and removed” were found physically present, just switched off.

So the answer I got was true about the agency’s filing cabinet and false about the world. Nobody had filed an inspection record. Somebody had inspected. Those are not the same thing, and I should have written it the second way the first time.

That’s the lesson I’m taking from it. When an agency tells you nothing happened, what it’s actually telling you is that it doesn’t have a record of it.

So we have two versions of the same twelve-month rule. The industry wrote one and offered it to EPA, and EPA never adopted it. Mississippi wrote its own and put it on xAI in 2025. And the state that wrote its version told me it keeps no records tracking it – though its own order lists the day each turbine arrived.

And the EPA never answered the petition as far as I can tell. It didn’t say yes and it didn’t say no – not in any record that’s turned up.

The petition itself lays out the law on that – an agency has to answer this kind of request in a reasonable time. If the answer is no, it has to say why. Neither one shows up in the file EPA released – but that file is a copy of what EPA gave SELC back in January, so it couldn’t show anything later.

Five and a half weeks after the petition came in, EPA put out a big new rule on turbines – but it didn’t give the industry what it asked for. Under that rule, a turbine on a trailer still counts as a stationary source.

But EPA didn’t shut the idea down either. It wrote a way out into the rule – a paragraph that would let portable turbines off the hook. Then it left that paragraph sitting there – doing nothing at all.

The way out only starts working if EPA does two more things. It has to write pollution limits for these machines. And it has to build a way to test each one against those limits. EPA said it isn’t doing either right now. Its words were that the question “deserve[s] further investigation before rulemaking action is taken.”

The EPA gave a reason for waiting, and it could be legit. They said if they let the turbines out before there’s a system to check them – they could end up “subject to no emission standards at all.”

But that seems like a hedge to me.

Nine weeks after that rule came out, COMET got a half hour with Aaron Szabo – that was March 19th, 2026. Szabo runs EPA’s air office, and if EPA ever writes those pollution limits, his office is the one that writes them.

The meeting is on EPA’s own public calendar. Anybody can look it up.

I don’t know what they talked about. The calendar gives a name, a date, and thirty minutes – and that’s all it gives anybody.

The lawsuit over the Southaven turbines is still going. The DOJ asked the judge for a written ruling by September 10th on its motion to throw the case out. It said that if she didn’t rule by then, it would treat her silence as a no and take it to the appeals court.

That date has now passed. The last thing filed in that case was on September 8th, and as I write this it has been quiet for ten days.

So – what does all this mean?

In terms of the lawsuit, xAI is the one on the hook. A Clean Air Act case can win an order to shut the machines down, plus fines that add up by the day. The company’s answer, in its own filings, is that the agencies told it these turbines were exempt – and that EPA’s rule landed months after it started running them.

Shelby County and Mississippi aren’t being sued at all. The only two defendants are xAI and MZX Tech – the company behind the Southaven site. Nobody is asking a court to fine a permitting agency for reading a word the wrong way.

And Shelby County doesn’t come out of this the way you’d expect. Back in August of 2024, the health department wrote to EPA and said the 364-day rule came from EPA’s own Region 4 staff. It forwarded the neighbors’ complaints and asked EPA to answer it.

EPA wrote back that November – it said those letters had started a formal review, and that its conclusions would come in a formal response letter. That letter has never turned up. xAI’s own lawyers told the judge this year that no such ruling has issued.

So the county asked the question two years ago, and it’s still waiting.

And no regular person gets a check out of any of this. Clean Air Act fines go to the U.S. Treasury – not to the people breathing it.

EPA could end the whole argument tomorrow. It’s had this question from Shelby County since 2024 and from the turbine industry since December of 2025 – and no record that’s turned up shows it has answered either one.

I wonder why this is? (No, I don’t)

But the bottom line is – when a ruling does come – even if it is against xAI – it won’t shut down either of the data centers.

Which is what I have been saying all along.

Every record this essay is built on is on its own page, and seven documents are hosted there in full so you can read them without asking anybody: 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 27th, 2026: This essay first said nobody had built the 41 permanent Southaven turbines – the plant is still being built, and the company briefly certified five of them as built before withdrawing the paperwork. It also said MDEQ keeps nothing that would let it check its twelve-month clock – its own order lists the day each turbine arrived.

Update, September 27th, 2026: Lines about what MDEQ and EPA have and haven’t said now say where that comes from.

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

The xAI files

Sources

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