Author: Willy Blackmore Published: 6/23/2025 Woord In Black
Overview:
Ahead of am anticipated lawsuit, the NAACP and Southern Enviromental Law Center are filing a complaint with the Envionmental Protection Agency. They allege that the Colossus’s electric power plant, which produces enough electricity to power a small city, is making a bad situation worse for the neighborhood’s Black residents.
Since June 2024, Elon Musk’s tech company, xAI, has run a massive data center known as Colossus in South Memphis that powers its chatbot Grok. It’s powered by dozens of methane-burning turbines — as many as 35 at one point — that are completely unpermitted.
Despite public outrage over the facility, however, xAI has made no significant changes to its operation. So the NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center are preparing to sue Musk for violating the Clean Air Act.
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“All too often, big corporations like xAI treat our communities and families like obstacles to be pushed aside,” NAACP President Derrick Johnson said in a statement. “We cannot afford to normalize this kind of environmental injustice — where billion-dollar companies set up polluting operations in Black neighborhoods without any permits and think they’ll get away with it because the people don’t have the power to fight back. We will not allow xAI to get away with this.”
Environmental Injustice
Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney with SELC, helped prepare the complaint against xAI on behalf of the NAACP. He says xAI “has been adding new turbines still and so we finally decided nobody else is going to take action and so we would have to.”
The paperwork sent last Tuesday is not a lawsuit, but is likely the first steps toward one. Before being able to sue over a Clear Air Act violation a complaint must be filed against the emitter, and they have a 60 day period in which to resolve any violations.
If that deadline passes without a resolution, the complaint can then be used as the basis for a lawsuit. And since xAI has not been communicative when it comes to Colossus, it seems unlikely that there will be a resolution without a lawsuit.
The SELC complaint against xAI includes four separate claims.
The first and most significant hinges on the distinction the EPA makes between major an”d minor pollution sources, and the different sets of rules and standards that apply to both categories.
“We will not allow xAI to get away with this.”
Patrick Anderson, a senior attorney with SELC,
The turbines that are running Colossus are capable of generating between 400 and 420 megawatts, depending on configuration. That’s the equivalent to a medium to large power plant – and, the NAACP alleges, is almost certainly a major pollution source, in the eyes of the EPA.
Four-Part Complaint
“Under the Clean Air Act, you cannot construct a major source without going through the major source permitting,” Anderson says. Even the permits that xAI has applied for, he says, are not what it would need as a major-source polluter.
The second claim is related to pollution-control technology: the Clean Air Act requires major sources to use the best available tech, and SELC claims that xAI is using none whatsoever. The third claim centers on local environmental regulations, which are approved by the EPA, and which also require an emitter like the Colossus facility to be permitted, which it still allegedly is not.
The fourth claim is focused on specific carcinogenic emissions, particularly formaldehyde. The type of turbines xAI uses produces a significant amount of the chemical, but purportedly without following any of the EPA regulations for major sources.
From Bad to Worse
Anderson says the complaints “all flow from the fact that these guys have built a power plant, basically without getting the permit and without using the pushing control technology that they should.”
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All of this is happening in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Memphis — a city with a 63% Black population that already has some of the worst air quality in all of the South.
“I can look at a map of where all these emitters are, and a map that shows where black people live in Memphis. And there’s a huge amount of overlap there,” Anderson says. Near Colossus, he says, is an oil refinery, a Tennessee Valley Authority power plant, a new steel mill, and a variety of other smaller polluters.
“Musk is looking at the entire country, and he picks an area [for Colossus] that has already degraded air quality, and he plops it down amongst all these other emitters in a majority black part of town,” Anderson says. “Those are just the facts.”