Mississippi regulators to hold xAI permit meeting on election day

With Elon Musk’s xAI planning to build a massive, natural-gas burning power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, the state’s environmental authority has scheduled a board meeting for Tuesday — Election Day for the 2026 primaries — to decide whether to grant the company key permits.

The NAACP and other civil rights and environmental advocates tried to get the meeting delayed, arguing that it was being rushed and would conflict with some residents’ efforts to vote. The groups also said that by holding the meeting in Jackson, nearly 200 miles away from Southaven, those directly affected by the plant are impeded from attending.

“This is not only a civic duty conundrum, but an unnecessary financial burden to Black residents and individuals who live in low-income and other communities near the facility,” the NAACP wrote in a letter to the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (MDEQ) that’s dated March 8, but was released publicly on Monday.

They asked that the hearing be rescheduled and moved to a site closer to the proposed facility.

The MDEQ denied the request on Monday, writing in a response to the NAACP that its permit board “regularly meets on the second Tuesday of each month, which has been the standard practice for decades,” and that the regulator, “considers matters on a statewide basis.” A copy of the letter was shared with CNBC.

The meeting is set to take place a little over a month after Musk merged xAI with SpaceX, his reusable rocket company, in a transaction that valued the combined entity at $1.25 trillion. Since starting xAI in 2023, Musk has tried to turn the AI company into an OpenAI competitor in the booming generative AI market.

Training and running AI models requires hefty amounts of compute and power, and rising utility bills have been partly blamed on the massive electricity consumption of new data centers. At a meeting last week with the White House, execs from tech companies, including xAI, signed non-binding pledges to supply their own power for their facilities.

So far, xAI has relied on its Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis, Tennessee, just across the Mississippi state line. In Southaven, a roughly 15 minute drive from Memphis, xAI is investing in the proposed power plant, and a large data center dubbed Macrohardrr.

Following the MDEQ’s response on Monday, the NAACP said in a statement that by having the hearing the morning of Election Day, three hours away from the community, “their actions speak volumes.”

“They’re trying to sneak xAI’s data center into the community’s backyard and they don’t care about the people living there,” the letter said.

In February, the NAACP filed a notice of intent to sue xAI over alleged Clean Air Act violations in Southaven.

As CNBC previously reported, residents in the area say they’ve endured round-the-clock noise pollution, and are concerned about air quality and public health issues from xAI’s use of “temporary” natural gas-burning turbines. Research by scientists at the University of Tennessee found that xAI’s earlier turbine use added to air pollution woes in Greater Memphis.

At a public hearing on Feb. 17 in Southaven, about 200 residents turned out to implore state and local officials to deny xAI authorization to rapidly build out data and power infrastructure without greater transparency, community engagement and effective efforts to prevent noise and air pollution.

Physicians, parents, teachers and local officials spoke out at the hearing.

“We are slowly falling out of love with where we have decided to grow our family,” said Taylor Logsdon, a mother of three, citing pollutants, noise levels and negative health effects. “It’s no coincidence that this is happening now. And I feel it will only get worse.”

A recent investigation by Floodlight showed that xAI has been operating more than a dozen “temporary” turbines concurrently in Southaven, as it previously did in Memphis. The company has argued that the turbines did not require federal permits, but environmental compliance experts have disagreed.

Community pushback and regulatory requirements are among the factors driving Musk and other tech executives to explore the potential of data centers in space.

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