3 min read
In this week’s edition of “Elon Musk treats the law as a polite suggestion for poor people”, his AI outfit xAI has been caught bolting 59 natural-gas turbines onto one of its data centres in Tennessee, seemingly without the federal clean-air permits those turbines legally require.
Fifty-nine of them, according to regulatory correspondence reviewed by Reuters, all humming away beside a warehouse of GPUs and belching combustion fumes into air that other people happen to breathe. Picture a small power station’s worth of exhaust stacks planted at the edge of a residential neighbourhood, hazing the skyline a faintly wrong shade of brown, and you are roughly there.
Why bolt a power station onto a computer
Because the grid cannot keep up, and waiting is for people who are not in a desperate hurry to win. Musk’s Colossus project needs a genuinely colossal amount of electricity, faster than any utility can string up transmission lines or build a plant. Temporary gas turbines are the industry cheat code: fast to install, fast to fire up, and fast to start pumping nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide and particulate matter out over the rooftops, the sort of low chemical haze you can taste at the back of your throat on a still, windless day.
The part that should actually make you angry
Those turbines sit near predominantly Black neighbourhoods around Memphis (because of course they do, classic Elon), communities that have spent months raising concerns about what concentrating industrial emissions on their doorstep does to a human body. This is the chapter the “AI will lift up all of humanity” crowd skips right over. The humanity getting lifted first is a set of shareholders in Austin and a column of benchmark scores; the particulate matter, meanwhile, gets delivered to a specific zip code that was never asked and never paid. (Jesus Christ… I despair.)
Permitting exists precisely so that somebody, anybody, checks whether you are allowed to dump combustion pollutants next to where families live and children sleep. And it is the children who carry this. Fine particulate lodges deep in small, still-developing lungs and does not leave; you are looking at kids who grow up with the tight morning cough and the wheeze halfway up the stairs, the same ruined little lungs we handed the chimney sweeps of the industrial revolution, except this time we have two full centuries of science telling us exactly what we are doing and we are doing it anyway. Skipping the permit is a calculated wager: that reaching the compute first is worth more than obeying the law, and that any eventual fine lands as a rounding error against the lead it buys. New York, at least, has started asking who pays; see our piece on its data-centre moratorium.
What happens now
Bypassing permits can, in theory, trigger legal action, operational limits and reputational damage, the last of which has historically bounced off this particular billionaire like gravel off a Cybertruck. The realistic outcome is a quiet settlement, a retroactively granted permit, and a stern press release nobody reads, whilst the turbines keep running throughout. Which is absolutely fine, obviously, provided you do not happen to live and breathe in Boxtown.
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Did you know: data centres are on course to swallow a rapidly rising share of US electricity this decade, and much of that new demand is being met not with the clean power in the glossy press releases but with exactly this sort of gas generation, hauled in and switched on in a hurry. The “cloud” is, increasingly, a shed full of chips kept alive by a fossil-fuel bonfire next to somebody’s house. So cool, Elon.