Elon Musk's xAI is running dozens of unpermitted methane turbines outside Memphis to power its Grok chatbot in a Black majority community, and the DOJ says shutting them down would harm national security.
Fifty-seven methane gas turbines sit in a row just south of the Memphis airport, on a slab of land that local air monitors already flag for smog-forming pollution. They run day and night to feed electricity to Colossus 2, a data center complex that trains Elon Musk's Grok chatbot, and they sit there without the operating permits the Clean Air Act requires for facilities of that size.
The neighborhood on the other side of the fence is a Black-majority community in Southaven, Mississippi, where rates of asthma and pediatric asthma hospitalizations rank among the highest in the country. It was residents and plaintiffs organized by the NAACP who sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech in April, asking a federal judge to shut the turbines down under the Clean Air Act and impose penalties for the unpermitted operation. Now the Department of Justice and the state of Mississippi are asking that same court to dismiss the case before it reaches the merits.
The DOJ's June filing, reported by Gizmodo and WIRED, argues that letting the NAACP's lawsuit proceed would "threaten American national, economic, and energy security" by cutting power to AI systems that support the "Department of War" and ongoing military operations. A separate declaration from Cameron Stanley, the chief digital and artificial intelligence officer at the Department of Defense, says the government's Grok Gov model was used in the U.S. campaign against Iran and helped deploy "over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours." Both arguments are filings, not findings. The question of whether Grok is genuinely vital to military operations is not before the court. What is before the court is whether DOJ can step in to defend a private company's unpermitted power infrastructure against a private environmental lawsuit.
The NAACP filed its complaint on April 14, alleging that 27 turbines were operating in violation of the Clean Air Act at the Southaven site. By mid-May, according to the Southern Environmental Law Center, the count had grown to 57, with more on order. SELC and Earthjustice are co-counsel on the case. The complaint cites estimated emissions of roughly 1,700 tons per year of nitrogen oxides, 180 tons of particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide, and 19 tons of formaldehyde, and asks the court to order the installation of best available control technology, halt operations until permits are obtained, and impose financial penalties. A 60-day notice of intent to sue was sent in February.
The DOJ's national-security argument is the new piece. In its motion to intervene, the department says Grok is "one of only four proprietary state-of-the-art AI models" capable of supporting Pentagon missions and "one of three" cleared for Secret and Top Secret classified networks. Stanley's declaration ties that capability to the Iran strikes, which he describes as a 96-hour campaign of more than 2,000 munitions. The NAACP has not yet filed a public response to the intervention motion, and xAI has not, as of this writing, commented on the filing.
Mississippi Governor Tate Reeves has filed his own documents siding with xAI, framing the turbines as critical state infrastructure. The federal-state alignment is unusual for a Clean Air Act citizen suit, where the Environmental Protection Agency is typically the enforcer and intervenes to defend its own permitting authority, not to dismiss the case on behalf of a private operator. The procedural question, then, is narrow and load-bearing: can DOJ step in as a party to ask the court to throw out the NAACP's complaint before any fact-finding on the turbines themselves?
The answer will shape how the rest of the case plays out. The NAACP's preliminary injunction motion, which targets the additional turbines brought online during litigation, is pending. A hearing on the intervention motion has not yet been scheduled. If the court grants DOJ's motion, the case ends before a permit question is decided. If it denies the motion, the suit moves toward the merits, and the turbines keep running in the meantime.