It seems xAI has been taking liberties with gas turbines that federal rules don’t actually tolerate.
This past summer, activists at the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) announced they were going after Elon Musk’s AI company, xAI, for what it claimed were “unpermitted gas turbines that threaten to make air pollution problems even worse,” in the Memphis area, where the xAI “Colossus” data centers are located. It appears the SELC has now prevailed, because the language of a general ruling from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regarding that type of turbine essentially confirms the activists’ assertion, undermining the Grok parent company’s legal rubric for using the equipment.
In order to serve the computational needs of products like the Grok AI chatbot, Grokipedia, and the Grok image generator, xAI was generating off-grid power for its data center with gas-powered turbines and classifying them as “non-road engines”—temporary generators, ostensibly used for more transitory purposes.
