Thermal imaging, displaying 24 active turbines would have been more relevant. The article contained one image, none of the alleged turbines were highlighted. As a layperson, I'm not sure what I am looking at here.
From a different perspective: the fact US businesses can assemble massive power plants on demand, in weeks, is quite an illustration of the economic dominance of the country.
If you mean the financial power to pay for such power plants, then I agree. But the technical capabilities to quickly provide stationary or mobile power plants can be purchased from a few large, international companies; noteworthy suppliers can be found in the USA, Europe and Asia. And they will build it for you in almost any country in the world, as I said, provided you pay accordingly. Of course, the delivery time of turbines is often a bottleneck, but this applies more to the very large ones than the smaller ones that should actually be installed here (and it also applies equally to all manufacturers).
They're big, by the standard of a domestic source such as a car, but they're not what I'd call "massive" in an economic dominance sense. About the size of a large shipping container, give or take, eyeballing from other photos that tell me which objects the turbines even are: https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/musks-xai-data-centre-...
It's a large power plant (400+ MW and rising), rapidly assembled from small, modular components. That's a remarkable thing from any point of view.
The other threads on this topic (powering AI hyperscalers) are usually about nuclear fission, which most of the large players are investing in. Those power plants often take 10+ years to build. One could imagine small reactor modules akin to these 16 MW shipping containers, built in factories and shipped on demand like these, to be assembled into a full power plant in weeks. If someone were to get that business model working, they'd dominate the industry. (Just how big of a premium did xAI pay their vendor, to have all this shipped halfway around the world on a priority schedule?)
There’s a reason this isn’t generally done for real power plants; these little turbines are pretty inefficient. This sort of thing is not uncommon for data centers and other things that need either a lot of backup power or a lot of temporary power, but it would not make for an economically viable power plant.
I mean 400 MW is tiling a 4km square with cheap PV, even after accounting for capacity factor. And 400 MW is also what you get from 1052 Tesla Model 3's at max acceleration, according to their website (though obviously draining a 74kWh battery at 510hp empties it rather a lot faster than "overnight"), and ICEs are also tiny power plants so you get the same power out from order-of-magnitude same number of those.
In fact, this is why I'm putting the money I can set aside for investments, into China rather than the USA: they're speed-running cheap PV and batteries, which are cheaper than most everything else right now.
Can't verify from the low quality photo in the article.
This [1] press release from the Southern Environmental Law Center hints to a possible reason - they may be migrating from small to bigger turbines:
> Aerial images obtained by SELC revealed 35 turbines at the site in March (...) while the company has removed some smaller-sized turbines, it has recently installed three larger turbines
Musk's playbook is to do the thing that he feels is obviously right, and figure out the consequences later, and because he's enough of a bully and rich enough, the consequences rarely end up being that big a deal. I believe it's ideological, and from that perspective have a hard time disagreeing with his motivations – I disagree with him, but think he's doing what makes sense to achieve his goals which he believes are good for the world.
He's done this with SpaceX many times over, bullying the FAA and the local council in Texas. He's done this with Tesla again and again with crash data and even selling products that don't exist to consumers. He's going to keep doing it until there are actual consequences because it's hard to say it's not a good business decision if you never actually have to pay for the issues you cause.
> Why is the datacenter not running? I paid $10bn for this. > We had some downtime for power reasons > Why aren't we running backup generators? > We are, but there's a limit to how many we're allowed to run > F** that, get some more generators, I'll talk to the president and get it approved.
This would fit with pretty much everything I've seen publicly from him, interviews etc.
If it were truly ideological for him, wouldn't that roof be covered in solar panels and he'd be leading the charge on shifting this huge energy consumption in this emergent high-use use cases towards renewable resources?
I don't think that green energy is actually his ideology here, or at least not for the last >5 years. With Tesla I think the ideology is making a "better" car not making a greener car. Electric cars are better performance, and making a self-driving car is an economic ideology – people shouldn't spend their valuable time driving.
You've nailed the pattern. And the regulatory environment actively enables it through what amounts to a pricing model for violations.
When the EPA or county eventually fines xAI for running unpermitted turbines for a year, it'll be what - a few hundred thousand? Maybe low millions if they're feeling particularly spicy? For a company chasing the AI gold rush with Musk's billions behind it, that's not a penalty - it's a rounding error. It's cheaper to violate now and pay later than to wait for permits while competitors build capacity.
And unfortunately, this isn't a bug in the regulatory system - it's the feature. When fines are pocket change relative to potential profits, "ask forgiveness not permission" becomes optimal strategy. The only things that actually change behavior are existential threats (criminal charges, shutdown orders) or catastrophic reputational damage - and Musk has proven immune to both.
Until penalties scale with company valuations or include mandatory shutdowns, this playbook will keep printing money. Memphis residents get respiratory disease, xAI gets compute capacity, and regulators get a check that wouldn't cover a week of Musk's jet fuel.
The root problem here is that the regulatory environment has been (in bits and pieces over the years) set up to be a checkbox exercise for those on the inside and exclusionary toward new entrants. The rules and process of that side of things are not subject to serious oversight so they can be as exclusionary and rent-seekey as the lobbyists and the bureaucrats want, potentially preventing any new entrants.
Musk has, very rightly, realized that the punishment track is subject to far more political and public scrutiny than the approval track and that if you are doing things that people want like building cars and sending rockets into space the scrutiny will prevent them from doing anything to financially cripple your operation.
Ironically, this is playbook that's common at the complete opposite end of the economic activity spectrum where there literally isn't the money to comply. People run unlicensed businesses, do un-permitted work, violate minor regulations, etc, etc, all the time. And by the time anyone figures it out, if anyone ever figures it out, it's too late.
Violations should result in a government ownership stake not monetary fines. That way if you prove yourself to not follow the rules, the government has a seat inside your business with enhanced powers to follow what you are doing. It also punishes the people most likely to force a change, the ownership, by diluting their ownership/value.
you are totally right which makes this so sad. a lot of regulations might be tedious but they have (most of the time) a good reason to exist. now the people around the data center will have to deal with terrible air quality so twitter users can ask about white genocide all day long
That this is a thing makes me wonder if Elon opened a can of worms with this new political party. He is not making any friends challenging the established parties. They will show no regulatory mercy.
It'd have to be a solar farm 3 kilometers on each side to meet a 400 megawatt load (with battery storage). If you take the entire block xAI colossus is on—it's 1.2 by 1.6 km—cut down all those trees, raze the elementary school (the one being smogged right now—did anyone notice there was a school right next to it?)—that, times five, is what you'd actually need.
The end goal is 2,000 megawatts for this datacenter, so multiply that by five again.
This CEO founded a solar power company, and a battery-storage company as well—I'm very certain he considered the all-solar option carefully, and rejected it for actual technical reasons; not vibes.
Who said it needed to be "all solar". Obvious anyone with a brain would have noticed it is dark at night and there would be no power production so "all solar" is litterally impossible.
There has been reporting about this for months. I realize I'm just a pleb, but I really don't understand why a company with, essentially, limitless money, won't simply install the emissions reducing hardware and properly permit the turbines. Like a lot of what's going on around Elon/US politics, it seems like a meaningless fight and is only further torching reputations. Just do the obvious right thing and move on.
They are allowed to run N turbines.. but have N+B turbines on the property.
They.. aren't breaking their permit. The article never says they are, it just sets things up for you to have that belief.
It looks like they are swapping turbines, thus the extras. They may also be hoping to get more approved.
These may also be properly emission reducing. The article never says they aren't - it only includes quotes from people saying they don't think they are with no evidence.
The news doesn't lie, but it gets as close as it can.
> I realize I'm just a pleb, but I really don't understand why a company with, essentially, limitless money, won't simply install the emissions reducing hardware and properly permit the turbines.
Its about exerting power by willfully defying law. "Catch me if you financially can."
Elon has a criminal history of at best ignoring regulations and at worst deliberately defying them. At Tesla he racked up enormous fines for illegal dumping and then a series of on site OSHA vioations. This is just part of the pattern.
The article reports that xAI operated gas turbines without required permits and pollution controls for over a year. That's not a "hit piece" - it's documenting regulatory violations with thermal imaging evidence and official permit records.
If this were actually a hit piece on Musk, wouldn't his name be in the headline? Instead, it's mentioned once in paragraph four as standard journalistic context - exactly how articles about AWS mention Bezos. And yes, the affected neighborhoods are predominantly Black - that's a factual demographic statement about who bears the health burden, not "playing the race card." Environmental justice reporting routinely documents how industrial pollution disproportionately impacts minority communities.
Your logic seems to be: "Musk has done good things for the environment globally, therefore local reporting about his company's regulatory violations must be a hit piece." That's a non sequitur. Both can be true - Tesla can advance EV adoption while xAI can violate air quality regulations in Memphis. One doesn't negate the other.
The real tell here is that you're more upset about accurate reporting than about a tech company potentially exposing already-vulnerable communities to additional pollution without proper permits. Your priorities seem to be incredibly misplaced, if you ask me.
How's your Tesla Model 3 doing, by the way? Not that I'd want to imply your choice of transportation has anything to do with your incredibly unfavorable interpretation of this article and defense of Musk. But I have to wonder if your perspective would be different if this facility was in your neighborhood rather than South Memphis, or if you drove a Hyundai.
> How's your Tesla Model 3 doing, by the way? Not that I'd want to imply your choice of transportation has anything to do with your incredibly unfavorable interpretation of this article and defense of Musk.
My Model 3 is great for 3.5 years and 110,000 km. At the time I bought it I felt it was too expensive for what it offered, but as I mentioned I've been advocating against carbon for decades and this was the first electric car available in my country. I bought one of the very first to arrive.
And yes, you are implying that somehow the car I drive is influencing my defence of Musk. If you had spent a bit more time examining my post history, you would have discovered that I am a huge SpaceX fan. That would have been at least a plausible argument in favour of your position. But alas, neither does that really affect how I view the article or Musk.
> And yes, you are implying that somehow the car I drive is influencing my defence of Musk.
Of course I was. The sarcasm wasn't exactly subtle.
> But alas, neither does that really affect how I view the article or Musk.
The fact that you believe this while simultaneously demonstrating the opposite is genuinely fascinating.
You opened with "I'm no Elon fan" and then revealed you bought one of the first Teslas in your country and are a "huge SpaceX fan." That's like a Yankees season ticket holder insisting their fandom doesn't affect how they judge controversial umpire calls.
Here's what I think happened: You've spent 3.5 years and 110,000 km in that Model 3, feeling like you're part of something transformative - saving the planet, advancing humanity to Mars, whatever narrative helps justify the premium you acknowledge overpaying. When criticism emerges about Musk's companies, it doesn't just challenge a corporation - it threatens the story you tell yourself about your choices.
The overpayment actually worsens this. You can't even tell yourself, "It was just a practical decision." Instead, you've had to construct meaning around that premium - that you're supporting something bigger, something important. The sunk cost isn't just financial; it's emotional and ideological.
So when an article documents xAI operating turbines without permits in already-polluted neighborhoods, you can't engage with those facts directly. Instead, you immediately pivot to Musk's environmental legacy, as if Tesla's global impact creates some cosmic pollution credit karma system where South Memphis residents should accept respiratory disease as acceptable collateral damage for you feeling great about your reduced carbon footprint.
The most telling part? You attacked the article for mentioning two basic facts that appear in literally every single environmental justice story: who owns the company (standard disclosure) and which communities are affected (relevant demographics). You called factual reporting a "hit piece" not because it was inaccurate, but because it made the guy who bought the companies that make the car you drive and the rockets you like to see go 'whoosh' look bad.
You claim the article is biased while demonstrating textbook motivated reasoning. You weren't reading critically - you were reading defensively, scanning for any angle to discredit reporting that challenges your worldview. The "race card" accusation was particularly desperate, as if noting which communities bear pollution burdens is somehow more offensive than the pollution itself.
The real tragedy here is that you could simply say, "Tesla's environmental benefits are real AND xAI should follow permit requirements." Both can be true! But that would require acknowledging that Musk's companies can do wrong, which apparently conflicts too strongly with whatever identity you've constructed around owning a Tesla and being a "huge fan" of SpaceX.
Also, it's pretty interesting that you felt compelled to respond to the little jab about owning a Tesla but chose not to engage with any of my factual criticism. Because that's the tiny part of my comment that threatened the identity you've built up. I'd encourage you to examine that.
You claim decades of carbon advocacy, yet your first instinct was to attack accurate reporting about unpermitted emissions. What exactly is your advocacy worth when you'll throw vulnerable communities under the bus the moment it conflicts with your parasocial relationship with a billionaire (or his companies)?
The saddest part? I genuinely believe you think you're being objective here.
Happy to hear the Model 3 is treating you well, though.
I love the tragedy you just wrote. Considering what you know about yourself and what you know about me, it describes a lot more of how you see the world than how I see the world.
I just realized I don't even know what "disproportionately impacts" actually means. Disproportionate to what? Does it simply mean bigger impact or bigger-than-predicted-by-an-oracle impact? Because I'm quite sure that every bad thing on this planet impacts poor people more.
"Disproportionately impacts" means that the burden of pollution isn't randomly distributed - it's systematically concentrated in specific communities. In this case: predominantly Black neighborhoods in South Memphis already have asthma rates and cancer risks 4x the national average (per the article), and xAI added unpermitted turbines to that existing burden.
You're absolutely right that most hazards affect poor communities more. That's not a coincidence - it's the predictable result of power dynamics in zoning and enforcement decisions.
Your comment reads a bit like "water is wet, why mention it?" But most people living in clean-air zip codes have no idea their comfort of living depends on someone else's respiratory disease. They assume industrial siting is purely based on logistics or economics, not on which communities lack the political capital to fight back.
The whole point is that zoning decisions, permit enforcement, and industrial siting aren't random acts of nature. Rich neighborhoods get golf courses and poor neighborhoods get data centers with unpermitted turbines. That's not gravity - it's policy. Documenting these patterns isn't stating the obvious, it's the first step toward accountability. Because "that's just how things are" is exactly what those benefiting from the status quo want everyone to believe.
This is such transparently bad faith rhetoric it's almost impressive. You're trying to paint me as racist for pointing out systemic racial inequities. But sure, I'll bite.
You're pretending "race" and "politics" are separate categories, as if centuries of explicitly racial policy - slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, voter suppression - somehow exists outside of politics.
Black Memphis residents were systematically excluded from voting until the 1960s. Redlining prevented Black families from building wealth through homeownership. When your grandparents couldn't vote, buy homes in certain areas, or sit on zoning boards, that directly determines whether your neighborhood gets parks or pollution today.
Sometimes it helps to put concepts into a different context to understand them better, so maybe this analogy helps: When I point out that Palestinians in the West Bank can't effectively oppose settlement expansion because they're systematically excluded from political power, I'm not claiming Palestinians are racially inferior because they're "incapable of manipulating power dynamics" in their favor. I'm pointing out how systematic disenfranchisement creates predictable and unjust outcomes. And even if those barriers vanished tomorrow, Palestinians would still live with the accumulated consequences for generations.
Same principle in Memphis. Noting that unpermitted pollution affects 90% Black neighborhoods isn't claiming racial inferiority - it's documenting the predictable result of decades of deliberate exclusion from political power.
If you genuinely can't grasp how racially motivated systematic political disenfranchisement creates racial disparities, start with basic history.
I'm so glad that you touched an analogy whose framework I am familiar with.
Palestinians in the West Bank can not oppose Israeli settlement expansion for the same reasons that white New Yorkers can not oppose Indian reservations from building houses. The Palestinians have their lands on which they build their settlements (areas A and B) and the Israelis build their settlements in area C - as agreed in the mutual agreements signed in the 1990s. Note that some Palestinians also live in Israeli settlements, while no Israelis are permitted to live in the Palestinian settlements - Israelis can not even drive into area A under threat of both law and lynch. Note also that Israel's population is 20% Palestinian, and those citizens enjoy all benefits of law, court, and society as do so other Christian, Jewish, and Druze citizens of Israel.
> I'm so glad that you touched an analogy whose framework I am familiar with.
Oh, I'm delighted too. Because you actually went there and completely let the mask slip. And with such spectacular historical revisionism, you've accidentally proven my entire point about systematic disenfranchisement. Thanks.
Your "white New Yorkers can't oppose Indian reservations" analogy is so ass-backwards it belongs in a museum of colonial apologetics. Palestinians aren't the white New Yorkers here - they're the Native Americans watching settlers build on their ancestral land while being told it's a "mutual agreement." You've literally inverted colonizer and colonized to paint the occupying power as the victim. That's not just wrong; it's a perverse inversion of reality that would make Orwell weep.
But let's dissect your Oslo fiction: Area C comprises 60% of the West Bank, where Palestinians need permits (denied 98% of the time) to build homes, dig wells, or install solar panels on their own land. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements - illegal under international law - expand freely with full state infrastructure. Between 2009-2018, Israel approved 98 out of 4,422 Palestinian permit applications. That's a 2.2% approval rate. For comparison, Harvard's acceptance rate is 3.4%. It's literally easier to get into Harvard than to get permission to build a chicken coop in your own backyard if you're Palestinian. Calling this "mutual agreement" is like calling the Trail of Tears a "voluntary relocation program."
You conveniently omit that Israel controls all borders, airspace, water aquifers, electromagnetic spectrum, population registry, and movement between areas. Palestinians in Area A can't leave without Israeli permission, can't import basic goods without Israeli approval, and can't even collect rainwater without Israeli permits. The average Palestinian gets 73 liters of water per day - below the WHO's 100-liter minimum for basic dignity - while Israeli settlers luxuriate with 300 liters, filling their swimming pools while Palestinian children develop kidney problems from chronic dehydration. That's not autonomy - it's the world's most sophisticated open-air prison. But please, clutch your pearls harder about how you're oppressed because you can't vacation in Ramallah.
Your "20% Palestinian citizens with full rights" talking point? The Nation-State Law explicitly defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people alone - apartheid codified in your Basic Law. The Admissions Committees Law lets 434 communities (43% of all Israeli towns) reject residents for "cultural incompatibility." Palestinian students get $8,400 per year while Jewish students get $12,000. Arab citizens own less than 4% of land despite being 20% of the population. There are ZERO Arab communities among Israel's 135 wealthiest localities. But sure, tell me more about those "equal benefits" while Bedouin villages that predate your state get demolished for the 200th time for lacking permits that are impossible to obtain.
The beautiful part is you've perfectly demonstrated my Memphis point. When I used Palestine as an example of how systematic exclusion from political power creates predictable disparities, you couldn't resist defending apartheid. You literally saw "systematic disenfranchisement" and thought "I should explain why that's actually good, actually."
So thank you, genuinely, for proving that whether it's Black families in South Memphis breathing carcinogens or Palestinian families in South Hebron rationing water, there will always be someone like you - comfortable, privileged, and utterly convinced that the boot on someone else's neck is there for their own good.
From what I understand that was not only financial investment. Aren't there stories of the guy sleeping on the factory floor trying to diagnose production issues?
Many people seem to discount pollution etc that only affects brown-ish people far away that they personally don't know. And guess in which places these kind of stunts are commonly pulled? You wouldn't plonk an illegally fume-belching data centre in a rich white 'hood even if there was plenty of electricity, because political power is the key lever.
You make a great point - pollution sources are often located on cheap land that's occupied, predominantly, by poor people, which, in most of the world, correlates with non-whites.
Would something like Flint have happened in Scarsdale or Los Altos? Of course not.
So this is an economic issue, not a race issue. The two are correlated (everything is correlated to something in a complex system), but to reduce the issue the actual economic factors are to be considered. Not the racial factors.
Or would it be fine if xAI were polluting a poor white neighbourhood?
We shouldn't be dumping pollution selectively in poor places at all.
But it is not coincidence: there is a lot of systematic racism (and other discrimination) in the world and in the US on top of that, that keeps not-white (and not 'Christian', not het, not male, not English-speaking) people not rich. The variables are not independent.
Skin colour is prominent in treating some humans as less than human.
>that the xAI air pollution disproportionately affects black neighbourhoods.
So is it true or not? If it true, the outcome is not equitable whether you call it racism or (probably more accurately) classism. It's part of the pernicious pattern among powerful companies of privatizing profits while socialising costs.
I live somewhere that's never had a smog problem so I'm not super familiar with it but do gas turbines actually generate smog? I feel like of all the classes of heat engines they'd produce the fewest particulates. Is this actually a problem out there in the West?
While natural gas is cleaner than coal in some obvious ways (i.e., no particulate solids), it has a specific problem with NOx, because of the super high temperatures inside internal-combustion gas turbines. The upside is higher thermodynamic efficiency (highest of any thermal source); the downside is, this.
Methane has no Nitrogen in it. All of that would have to come from the air. It's famously very very hard to react Nitrogen that way, I'd be surprised if gas turbines produced it in noticeable quantities.
EDIT: didn't see your edit until now. Heh it shouldn't be too hard to scrub out if it were really a problem. That seems like a better way to handle it than this weird exemption process that seems to be in place now.
> "Heh it shouldn't be too hard to scrub out if it were really a problem."
The entire point of this dispute is that xAI could install scrubbers for these emissions, but chooses not too. The Ars Technica article discusses this at great length.
It's impurities in oxidizer. 80% of air is N2, 20% O2. N2 + O2 -> NOx minus some kJ(endothermic). Means, run plain air through anything hot and NOx comes out. Doesn't matter how pure the fuel, doesn't have to be an ICE, doesn't need fuel at all. Hot stuff in the air = NOx.
If it were so easy just better refine the fuel why would Europeans bother to add these converters and adblue injectors? No it's not impurities, but high pressure/temperature combustion. The higher the more efficient and more NOx comes out.
However, it's not insane to look at what experts put in place and consider that there are reasons why they have done that. Yes, experts can be wrong or are forced to make sub-optimal decisions, but it's worth examining their thinking behind the decisions.
In theory, yes. In practise, the experts will also consider real-world constraints (e.g. cost, planning, staffing etc). Also, taking the advice/opinion of respected experts (i.e. not YouTube experts) is a short-cut to spending years studying the science (that they had to do) yourself and that's even assuming that you can reach the same level of competency as them.
Fuel NOx is only one of them, which you quite rightly point out is not dominant in methane combustion due to the rarity of nitrogen in the fuel.
The dominant source in methane combustion is thermal NOx, which forms due to the extreme temperature of the combustion, causing atmospheric nitrogen to decompose and react with atmospheric oxygen.
Thermal imaging, displaying 24 active turbines would have been more relevant. The article contained one image, none of the alleged turbines were highlighted. As a layperson, I'm not sure what I am looking at here.
Perhaps this article clears things up:
https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...
Thanks. Here's a direct link to the only relevant image.
https://www.selc.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/Untitled-des...
Notable that there are 8 very large/hot heat sources, ~20 much smaller ones. Presumably these are bigger turbines.
Consolidating down lots of small generators to bigger ones might the idea here?
From a different perspective: the fact US businesses can assemble massive power plants on demand, in weeks, is quite an illustration of the economic dominance of the country.
If you mean the financial power to pay for such power plants, then I agree. But the technical capabilities to quickly provide stationary or mobile power plants can be purchased from a few large, international companies; noteworthy suppliers can be found in the USA, Europe and Asia. And they will build it for you in almost any country in the world, as I said, provided you pay accordingly. Of course, the delivery time of turbines is often a bottleneck, but this applies more to the very large ones than the smaller ones that should actually be installed here (and it also applies equally to all manufacturers).
16.48 MW each: https://www.shelbytnhealth.com/DocumentCenter/View/7174/0115...
They're big, by the standard of a domestic source such as a car, but they're not what I'd call "massive" in an economic dominance sense. About the size of a large shipping container, give or take, eyeballing from other photos that tell me which objects the turbines even are: https://www.capacitymedia.com/article/musks-xai-data-centre-...
It's a large power plant (400+ MW and rising), rapidly assembled from small, modular components. That's a remarkable thing from any point of view.
The other threads on this topic (powering AI hyperscalers) are usually about nuclear fission, which most of the large players are investing in. Those power plants often take 10+ years to build. One could imagine small reactor modules akin to these 16 MW shipping containers, built in factories and shipped on demand like these, to be assembled into a full power plant in weeks. If someone were to get that business model working, they'd dominate the industry. (Just how big of a premium did xAI pay their vendor, to have all this shipped halfway around the world on a priority schedule?)
There’s a reason this isn’t generally done for real power plants; these little turbines are pretty inefficient. This sort of thing is not uncommon for data centers and other things that need either a lot of backup power or a lot of temporary power, but it would not make for an economically viable power plant.
Not that remarkable.
I mean 400 MW is tiling a 4km square with cheap PV, even after accounting for capacity factor. And 400 MW is also what you get from 1052 Tesla Model 3's at max acceleration, according to their website (though obviously draining a 74kWh battery at 510hp empties it rather a lot faster than "overnight"), and ICEs are also tiny power plants so you get the same power out from order-of-magnitude same number of those.
In fact, this is why I'm putting the money I can set aside for investments, into China rather than the USA: they're speed-running cheap PV and batteries, which are cheaper than most everything else right now.
given musk's attitude to the waste management (just pump it into the lungs of the local population), god help us if he gets access to nuclear reactors
> just pump it into the lungs of the local population
Source please? I'm not aware of this
SpaceX: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna166283
Tesla: https://www.wsj.com/business/autos/elon-musk-tesla-environme...
Of course XAI is this article we’re all commenting on but here’s an older one: https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-memph...
Lara Kolodnys article claiming there's Mercury in the water?
That's the article you linked?
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Source for the timeline? Nowhere in the article is it said that the construction happened within weeks.
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Can't verify from the low quality photo in the article.
This [1] press release from the Southern Environmental Law Center hints to a possible reason - they may be migrating from small to bigger turbines:
> Aerial images obtained by SELC revealed 35 turbines at the site in March (...) while the company has removed some smaller-sized turbines, it has recently installed three larger turbines
[1] https://www.selc.org/press-release/elon-musks-xai-threatened...
Musk's playbook is to do the thing that he feels is obviously right, and figure out the consequences later, and because he's enough of a bully and rich enough, the consequences rarely end up being that big a deal. I believe it's ideological, and from that perspective have a hard time disagreeing with his motivations – I disagree with him, but think he's doing what makes sense to achieve his goals which he believes are good for the world.
He's done this with SpaceX many times over, bullying the FAA and the local council in Texas. He's done this with Tesla again and again with crash data and even selling products that don't exist to consumers. He's going to keep doing it until there are actual consequences because it's hard to say it's not a good business decision if you never actually have to pay for the issues you cause.
Somehow I doubt that he is personally involved in provisioning auxiliary power sources for a Tennessee datacenter.
You don't think so?
> Why is the datacenter not running? I paid $10bn for this. > We had some downtime for power reasons > Why aren't we running backup generators? > We are, but there's a limit to how many we're allowed to run > F** that, get some more generators, I'll talk to the president and get it approved.
This would fit with pretty much everything I've seen publicly from him, interviews etc.
On the other hand, projecting him into a minute scenario as a malign, micromanaging madman fits with the rampant partisan hysteria I've seen at HN.
If it were truly ideological for him, wouldn't that roof be covered in solar panels and he'd be leading the charge on shifting this huge energy consumption in this emergent high-use use cases towards renewable resources?
I don't think that green energy is actually his ideology here, or at least not for the last >5 years. With Tesla I think the ideology is making a "better" car not making a greener car. Electric cars are better performance, and making a self-driving car is an economic ideology – people shouldn't spend their valuable time driving.
You must have missed the last several years of Musk’s ideology on display.
You've nailed the pattern. And the regulatory environment actively enables it through what amounts to a pricing model for violations.
When the EPA or county eventually fines xAI for running unpermitted turbines for a year, it'll be what - a few hundred thousand? Maybe low millions if they're feeling particularly spicy? For a company chasing the AI gold rush with Musk's billions behind it, that's not a penalty - it's a rounding error. It's cheaper to violate now and pay later than to wait for permits while competitors build capacity.
And unfortunately, this isn't a bug in the regulatory system - it's the feature. When fines are pocket change relative to potential profits, "ask forgiveness not permission" becomes optimal strategy. The only things that actually change behavior are existential threats (criminal charges, shutdown orders) or catastrophic reputational damage - and Musk has proven immune to both.
Until penalties scale with company valuations or include mandatory shutdowns, this playbook will keep printing money. Memphis residents get respiratory disease, xAI gets compute capacity, and regulators get a check that wouldn't cover a week of Musk's jet fuel.
The root problem here is that the regulatory environment has been (in bits and pieces over the years) set up to be a checkbox exercise for those on the inside and exclusionary toward new entrants. The rules and process of that side of things are not subject to serious oversight so they can be as exclusionary and rent-seekey as the lobbyists and the bureaucrats want, potentially preventing any new entrants.
Musk has, very rightly, realized that the punishment track is subject to far more political and public scrutiny than the approval track and that if you are doing things that people want like building cars and sending rockets into space the scrutiny will prevent them from doing anything to financially cripple your operation.
Ironically, this is playbook that's common at the complete opposite end of the economic activity spectrum where there literally isn't the money to comply. People run unlicensed businesses, do un-permitted work, violate minor regulations, etc, etc, all the time. And by the time anyone figures it out, if anyone ever figures it out, it's too late.
Violations should result in a government ownership stake not monetary fines. That way if you prove yourself to not follow the rules, the government has a seat inside your business with enhanced powers to follow what you are doing. It also punishes the people most likely to force a change, the ownership, by diluting their ownership/value.
I mean, lots of people in history did what they thought would be good for the world...
you are totally right which makes this so sad. a lot of regulations might be tedious but they have (most of the time) a good reason to exist. now the people around the data center will have to deal with terrible air quality so twitter users can ask about white genocide all day long
That this is a thing makes me wonder if Elon opened a can of worms with this new political party. He is not making any friends challenging the established parties. They will show no regulatory mercy.
I am looking at that roof and thinking how much better it would look as one massive solar panel.
It'd have to be a solar farm 3 kilometers on each side to meet a 400 megawatt load (with battery storage). If you take the entire block xAI colossus is on—it's 1.2 by 1.6 km—cut down all those trees, raze the elementary school (the one being smogged right now—did anyone notice there was a school right next to it?)—that, times five, is what you'd actually need.
https://www.google.com/maps/search/xai+colossus
The end goal is 2,000 megawatts for this datacenter, so multiply that by five again.
This CEO founded a solar power company, and a battery-storage company as well—I'm very certain he considered the all-solar option carefully, and rejected it for actual technical reasons; not vibes.
> all-solar option
Who said it needed to be "all solar". Obvious anyone with a brain would have noticed it is dark at night and there would be no power production so "all solar" is litterally impossible.
The article talks about pollution but I’d expect them to be very noisy as well. Gas turbines are essentially redesigned aircraft engines.
> I’d expect them to be very noisy as well.
I expect they are muffled. They are not jet engines.
Why do you 'expect' that? What about this situation has caused you to give a notorious liar (borderline con artist) the benefit of the doubt?
There has been reporting about this for months. I realize I'm just a pleb, but I really don't understand why a company with, essentially, limitless money, won't simply install the emissions reducing hardware and properly permit the turbines. Like a lot of what's going on around Elon/US politics, it seems like a meaningless fight and is only further torching reputations. Just do the obvious right thing and move on.
Read the article carefully.
They are allowed to run N turbines.. but have N+B turbines on the property.
They.. aren't breaking their permit. The article never says they are, it just sets things up for you to have that belief.
It looks like they are swapping turbines, thus the extras. They may also be hoping to get more approved.
These may also be properly emission reducing. The article never says they aren't - it only includes quotes from people saying they don't think they are with no evidence.
The news doesn't lie, but it gets as close as it can.
So being permitted to run 15 turbines and the installing and running 24 turbines is not breaking your permit?
How many are running?
Having isn't running.
From the top comment:
https://i.imgur.com/7efRrBG.png
I count 8 big blobs and 15 small ones
> I realize I'm just a pleb, but I really don't understand why a company with, essentially, limitless money, won't simply install the emissions reducing hardware and properly permit the turbines.
Its about exerting power by willfully defying law. "Catch me if you financially can."
One can only hope that after their recent falling-out the Trump administration will re-energise the EPA...
I'm still skeptical this falling out is real and not just promo for his party.
Elon has a criminal history of at best ignoring regulations and at worst deliberately defying them. At Tesla he racked up enormous fines for illegal dumping and then a series of on site OSHA vioations. This is just part of the pattern.
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The article reports that xAI operated gas turbines without required permits and pollution controls for over a year. That's not a "hit piece" - it's documenting regulatory violations with thermal imaging evidence and official permit records.
If this were actually a hit piece on Musk, wouldn't his name be in the headline? Instead, it's mentioned once in paragraph four as standard journalistic context - exactly how articles about AWS mention Bezos. And yes, the affected neighborhoods are predominantly Black - that's a factual demographic statement about who bears the health burden, not "playing the race card." Environmental justice reporting routinely documents how industrial pollution disproportionately impacts minority communities.
Your logic seems to be: "Musk has done good things for the environment globally, therefore local reporting about his company's regulatory violations must be a hit piece." That's a non sequitur. Both can be true - Tesla can advance EV adoption while xAI can violate air quality regulations in Memphis. One doesn't negate the other.
The real tell here is that you're more upset about accurate reporting than about a tech company potentially exposing already-vulnerable communities to additional pollution without proper permits. Your priorities seem to be incredibly misplaced, if you ask me.
How's your Tesla Model 3 doing, by the way? Not that I'd want to imply your choice of transportation has anything to do with your incredibly unfavorable interpretation of this article and defense of Musk. But I have to wonder if your perspective would be different if this facility was in your neighborhood rather than South Memphis, or if you drove a Hyundai.
And yes, you are implying that somehow the car I drive is influencing my defence of Musk. If you had spent a bit more time examining my post history, you would have discovered that I am a huge SpaceX fan. That would have been at least a plausible argument in favour of your position. But alas, neither does that really affect how I view the article or Musk.
> And yes, you are implying that somehow the car I drive is influencing my defence of Musk.
Of course I was. The sarcasm wasn't exactly subtle.
> But alas, neither does that really affect how I view the article or Musk.
The fact that you believe this while simultaneously demonstrating the opposite is genuinely fascinating.
You opened with "I'm no Elon fan" and then revealed you bought one of the first Teslas in your country and are a "huge SpaceX fan." That's like a Yankees season ticket holder insisting their fandom doesn't affect how they judge controversial umpire calls.
Here's what I think happened: You've spent 3.5 years and 110,000 km in that Model 3, feeling like you're part of something transformative - saving the planet, advancing humanity to Mars, whatever narrative helps justify the premium you acknowledge overpaying. When criticism emerges about Musk's companies, it doesn't just challenge a corporation - it threatens the story you tell yourself about your choices.
The overpayment actually worsens this. You can't even tell yourself, "It was just a practical decision." Instead, you've had to construct meaning around that premium - that you're supporting something bigger, something important. The sunk cost isn't just financial; it's emotional and ideological.
So when an article documents xAI operating turbines without permits in already-polluted neighborhoods, you can't engage with those facts directly. Instead, you immediately pivot to Musk's environmental legacy, as if Tesla's global impact creates some cosmic pollution credit karma system where South Memphis residents should accept respiratory disease as acceptable collateral damage for you feeling great about your reduced carbon footprint.
The most telling part? You attacked the article for mentioning two basic facts that appear in literally every single environmental justice story: who owns the company (standard disclosure) and which communities are affected (relevant demographics). You called factual reporting a "hit piece" not because it was inaccurate, but because it made the guy who bought the companies that make the car you drive and the rockets you like to see go 'whoosh' look bad.
You claim the article is biased while demonstrating textbook motivated reasoning. You weren't reading critically - you were reading defensively, scanning for any angle to discredit reporting that challenges your worldview. The "race card" accusation was particularly desperate, as if noting which communities bear pollution burdens is somehow more offensive than the pollution itself.
The real tragedy here is that you could simply say, "Tesla's environmental benefits are real AND xAI should follow permit requirements." Both can be true! But that would require acknowledging that Musk's companies can do wrong, which apparently conflicts too strongly with whatever identity you've constructed around owning a Tesla and being a "huge fan" of SpaceX.
Also, it's pretty interesting that you felt compelled to respond to the little jab about owning a Tesla but chose not to engage with any of my factual criticism. Because that's the tiny part of my comment that threatened the identity you've built up. I'd encourage you to examine that.
You claim decades of carbon advocacy, yet your first instinct was to attack accurate reporting about unpermitted emissions. What exactly is your advocacy worth when you'll throw vulnerable communities under the bus the moment it conflicts with your parasocial relationship with a billionaire (or his companies)?
The saddest part? I genuinely believe you think you're being objective here.
Happy to hear the Model 3 is treating you well, though.
I love the tragedy you just wrote. Considering what you know about yourself and what you know about me, it describes a lot more of how you see the world than how I see the world.
I just realized I don't even know what "disproportionately impacts" actually means. Disproportionate to what? Does it simply mean bigger impact or bigger-than-predicted-by-an-oracle impact? Because I'm quite sure that every bad thing on this planet impacts poor people more.
"Disproportionately impacts" means that the burden of pollution isn't randomly distributed - it's systematically concentrated in specific communities. In this case: predominantly Black neighborhoods in South Memphis already have asthma rates and cancer risks 4x the national average (per the article), and xAI added unpermitted turbines to that existing burden.
You're absolutely right that most hazards affect poor communities more. That's not a coincidence - it's the predictable result of power dynamics in zoning and enforcement decisions.
Your comment reads a bit like "water is wet, why mention it?" But most people living in clean-air zip codes have no idea their comfort of living depends on someone else's respiratory disease. They assume industrial siting is purely based on logistics or economics, not on which communities lack the political capital to fight back.
The whole point is that zoning decisions, permit enforcement, and industrial siting aren't random acts of nature. Rich neighborhoods get golf courses and poor neighborhoods get data centers with unpermitted turbines. That's not gravity - it's policy. Documenting these patterns isn't stating the obvious, it's the first step toward accountability. Because "that's just how things are" is exactly what those benefiting from the status quo want everyone to believe.
This is such transparently bad faith rhetoric it's almost impressive. You're trying to paint me as racist for pointing out systemic racial inequities. But sure, I'll bite.
You're pretending "race" and "politics" are separate categories, as if centuries of explicitly racial policy - slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, voter suppression - somehow exists outside of politics.
Black Memphis residents were systematically excluded from voting until the 1960s. Redlining prevented Black families from building wealth through homeownership. When your grandparents couldn't vote, buy homes in certain areas, or sit on zoning boards, that directly determines whether your neighborhood gets parks or pollution today.
Sometimes it helps to put concepts into a different context to understand them better, so maybe this analogy helps: When I point out that Palestinians in the West Bank can't effectively oppose settlement expansion because they're systematically excluded from political power, I'm not claiming Palestinians are racially inferior because they're "incapable of manipulating power dynamics" in their favor. I'm pointing out how systematic disenfranchisement creates predictable and unjust outcomes. And even if those barriers vanished tomorrow, Palestinians would still live with the accumulated consequences for generations.
Same principle in Memphis. Noting that unpermitted pollution affects 90% Black neighborhoods isn't claiming racial inferiority - it's documenting the predictable result of decades of deliberate exclusion from political power.
If you genuinely can't grasp how racially motivated systematic political disenfranchisement creates racial disparities, start with basic history.
I'm so glad that you touched an analogy whose framework I am familiar with.
Palestinians in the West Bank can not oppose Israeli settlement expansion for the same reasons that white New Yorkers can not oppose Indian reservations from building houses. The Palestinians have their lands on which they build their settlements (areas A and B) and the Israelis build their settlements in area C - as agreed in the mutual agreements signed in the 1990s. Note that some Palestinians also live in Israeli settlements, while no Israelis are permitted to live in the Palestinian settlements - Israelis can not even drive into area A under threat of both law and lynch. Note also that Israel's population is 20% Palestinian, and those citizens enjoy all benefits of law, court, and society as do so other Christian, Jewish, and Druze citizens of Israel.
> I'm so glad that you touched an analogy whose framework I am familiar with.
Oh, I'm delighted too. Because you actually went there and completely let the mask slip. And with such spectacular historical revisionism, you've accidentally proven my entire point about systematic disenfranchisement. Thanks.
Your "white New Yorkers can't oppose Indian reservations" analogy is so ass-backwards it belongs in a museum of colonial apologetics. Palestinians aren't the white New Yorkers here - they're the Native Americans watching settlers build on their ancestral land while being told it's a "mutual agreement." You've literally inverted colonizer and colonized to paint the occupying power as the victim. That's not just wrong; it's a perverse inversion of reality that would make Orwell weep.
But let's dissect your Oslo fiction: Area C comprises 60% of the West Bank, where Palestinians need permits (denied 98% of the time) to build homes, dig wells, or install solar panels on their own land. Meanwhile, Israeli settlements - illegal under international law - expand freely with full state infrastructure. Between 2009-2018, Israel approved 98 out of 4,422 Palestinian permit applications. That's a 2.2% approval rate. For comparison, Harvard's acceptance rate is 3.4%. It's literally easier to get into Harvard than to get permission to build a chicken coop in your own backyard if you're Palestinian. Calling this "mutual agreement" is like calling the Trail of Tears a "voluntary relocation program."
You conveniently omit that Israel controls all borders, airspace, water aquifers, electromagnetic spectrum, population registry, and movement between areas. Palestinians in Area A can't leave without Israeli permission, can't import basic goods without Israeli approval, and can't even collect rainwater without Israeli permits. The average Palestinian gets 73 liters of water per day - below the WHO's 100-liter minimum for basic dignity - while Israeli settlers luxuriate with 300 liters, filling their swimming pools while Palestinian children develop kidney problems from chronic dehydration. That's not autonomy - it's the world's most sophisticated open-air prison. But please, clutch your pearls harder about how you're oppressed because you can't vacation in Ramallah.
Your "20% Palestinian citizens with full rights" talking point? The Nation-State Law explicitly defines Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people alone - apartheid codified in your Basic Law. The Admissions Committees Law lets 434 communities (43% of all Israeli towns) reject residents for "cultural incompatibility." Palestinian students get $8,400 per year while Jewish students get $12,000. Arab citizens own less than 4% of land despite being 20% of the population. There are ZERO Arab communities among Israel's 135 wealthiest localities. But sure, tell me more about those "equal benefits" while Bedouin villages that predate your state get demolished for the 200th time for lacking permits that are impossible to obtain.
The beautiful part is you've perfectly demonstrated my Memphis point. When I used Palestine as an example of how systematic exclusion from political power creates predictable disparities, you couldn't resist defending apartheid. You literally saw "systematic disenfranchisement" and thought "I should explain why that's actually good, actually."
So thank you, genuinely, for proving that whether it's Black families in South Memphis breathing carcinogens or Palestinian families in South Hebron rationing water, there will always be someone like you - comfortable, privileged, and utterly convinced that the boot on someone else's neck is there for their own good.
> I can not think of a single human who has done more to reduce dependence on fossil fuels
I'm struggling to see how it's a single human that is responsible when they just invested in companies?
From what I understand that was not only financial investment. Aren't there stories of the guy sleeping on the factory floor trying to diagnose production issues?
Many people seem to discount pollution etc that only affects brown-ish people far away that they personally don't know. And guess in which places these kind of stunts are commonly pulled? You wouldn't plonk an illegally fume-belching data centre in a rich white 'hood even if there was plenty of electricity, because political power is the key lever.
(I am a 'rich' white western man, FWIW.)
You make a great point - pollution sources are often located on cheap land that's occupied, predominantly, by poor people, which, in most of the world, correlates with non-whites.
Would something like Flint have happened in Scarsdale or Los Altos? Of course not.
So this is an economic issue, not a race issue. The two are correlated (everything is correlated to something in a complex system), but to reduce the issue the actual economic factors are to be considered. Not the racial factors.
Or would it be fine if xAI were polluting a poor white neighbourhood?
We shouldn't be dumping pollution selectively in poor places at all.
But it is not coincidence: there is a lot of systematic racism (and other discrimination) in the world and in the US on top of that, that keeps not-white (and not 'Christian', not het, not male, not English-speaking) people not rich. The variables are not independent.
Skin colour is prominent in treating some humans as less than human.
Well I'm three of your "not"s, my grandfather was a slave, and I still don't see this as a race issue.
>They claim that the xAI air pollution disproportionately affects black neighbourhoods.
Does it? What are the demographics near those turbines?
Does it really make a difference? Unless, of course, there was a cheaper location near predominantly white neighborhoods.
The OP had an issue with the claim
>that the xAI air pollution disproportionately affects black neighbourhoods.
So is it true or not? If it true, the outcome is not equitable whether you call it racism or (probably more accurately) classism. It's part of the pernicious pattern among powerful companies of privatizing profits while socialising costs.
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>I'm no Elon fan, but I can not think of a single human who has done more to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.
We could use some of that clean energy he's facilitated to extract a small amount of gold from seawater.
Enough to fashion a gold medal we could then award you for first place in olympic level mental gymnastics.
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I know right, why do people care so much about air pollution? It’s not like it kills anyone, right? What’s smog anyway?
I live somewhere that's never had a smog problem so I'm not super familiar with it but do gas turbines actually generate smog? I feel like of all the classes of heat engines they'd produce the fewest particulates. Is this actually a problem out there in the West?
Burning of methane (natural gas) produces oxides of nitrogen (NOx) (several types), which are a major driver of smog. See, as a starting point,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx
While natural gas is cleaner than coal in some obvious ways (i.e., no particulate solids), it has a specific problem with NOx, because of the super high temperatures inside internal-combustion gas turbines. The upside is higher thermodynamic efficiency (highest of any thermal source); the downside is, this.
Methane has no Nitrogen in it. All of that would have to come from the air. It's famously very very hard to react Nitrogen that way, I'd be surprised if gas turbines produced it in noticeable quantities.
EDIT: didn't see your edit until now. Heh it shouldn't be too hard to scrub out if it were really a problem. That seems like a better way to handle it than this weird exemption process that seems to be in place now.
Surprised? Gas turbines do produce large amounts of NOx, it’s been a huge effort over decades to bring it down in both aviation and stationary plants… (e.g. https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2015-01/documents/05... )
> "Heh it shouldn't be too hard to scrub out if it were really a problem."
The entire point of this dispute is that xAI could install scrubbers for these emissions, but chooses not too. The Ars Technica article discusses this at great length.
Oh I didn't realize that. Yeah they need to follow the law or build the thing somewhere else.
All diesels produce enough of NOx that catalytic reduction is needed.
Diesel has a lot of impurities. Methane is just one molecule.
It's impurities in oxidizer. 80% of air is N2, 20% O2. N2 + O2 -> NOx minus some kJ(endothermic). Means, run plain air through anything hot and NOx comes out. Doesn't matter how pure the fuel, doesn't have to be an ICE, doesn't need fuel at all. Hot stuff in the air = NOx.
If it were so easy just better refine the fuel why would Europeans bother to add these converters and adblue injectors? No it's not impurities, but high pressure/temperature combustion. The higher the more efficient and more NOx comes out.
Europe does all kinds of things, basing your understanding of chemistry around what a state does rather than the other way around is literally insane.
However, it's not insane to look at what experts put in place and consider that there are reasons why they have done that. Yes, experts can be wrong or are forced to make sub-optimal decisions, but it's worth examining their thinking behind the decisions.
It is always science -> experts. NOT the other way around.
In theory, yes. In practise, the experts will also consider real-world constraints (e.g. cost, planning, staffing etc). Also, taking the advice/opinion of respected experts (i.e. not YouTube experts) is a short-cut to spending years studying the science (that they had to do) yourself and that's even assuming that you can reach the same level of competency as them.
There are multiple NOx sources during combustion.
Fuel NOx is only one of them, which you quite rightly point out is not dominant in methane combustion due to the rarity of nitrogen in the fuel.
The dominant source in methane combustion is thermal NOx, which forms due to the extreme temperature of the combustion, causing atmospheric nitrogen to decompose and react with atmospheric oxygen.
Source: https://www.epa.gov/sites/default/files/2020-09/documents/1....
It is not a problem if the plant respects regulation and industry standards... which in this particular case doesn’t seem to be a priority.
Besides that, who would imagine Elon Musk, of all people, would be breaking laws?
- person who has never in their life checked an aqi map of earth
Many investors use imaging to see how many customers visit a store -- they count the cars in the parking lot at certain times of day.
that's actually an interesting point. Like people using sat imaging on steel depot in australian to evaluate the demand