Elon Musk’s new AI data center has turned a formerly quiet Mississippi town into a noisy nightmare.
The $20 billion facility, run by Musk’s AI firm xAI, is powered by 27 methane gas turbines that run day and night, belching fumes and emitting a constant noise like jet engines, NBC News reports. The turbines were trucked in because Southaven, the unsuspecting rural community that Musk chose to build the data center in, can’t provide the electricity the facility needs.
And, of course, the rapid pace of the AI industry can’t stop to wait for more sustainable energy options to be built up — or to hear out the protests of locals who are alarmed at how the tranquility of their town was blown up practically overnight by an installation that feels like it was designed by Sauron himself. The noise drove resident Krystal Polk to move out of her home which her family owned during a time when many Black families were still sharecropping, she told NBC News.
“I just haven’t really internalized that this is here and this is what’s happening,” she added.
More noise-makers may be on the way. The turbines are nominally intended to be “temporary,” meaning that xAI can install them before getting official permits. But xAI has also applied for a permit to install 41 permanent turbines across the 114-acre facility, which doesn’t bode well for those hoping that the cacophony would eventually die down.
Locals have complained about the whiplash pace of the facility that’s disrupting the community.
“The scale, the speed, the intensity of this expansion are unlike anything this area has absorbed,” Southaven native Nathan Reed told NBC News. “This was not a thoughtful, phased development. It was an industrial surge imposed on our residential community.”
In a Facebook post, Mayor Darren Musselwhite, a Republican, acknowledged that the noise was a “legitimate concern” but framed the outcry as politically motivated attacks against Musk. In January, he claimed that xAI installed a $7 million sound wall to muffle the noise, and suggested that the permanent turbines xAI plans to bring in will be quieter.
Many residents aren’t convinced, pointing to the sound wall’s minimal impact.
“We make fun of it and say, ‘It’s the Temu sound wall,’” Taylor Logsdon, a resident who lives close to the facility and a member of a local group opposing the project, told NBC.
And noise may just be the beginning of their problems. Logsdon claims two of her children developed respiratory problems since the facility went online. The Southern Environmental Law Center, NBC notes, has stated that the gas turbines release hazardous chemicals like formaldehyde, a known carcinogen that can cause respiratory issues.
Southaven isn’t alone. Outside Memphis, Tennessee, residents of the predominantly Black neighborhood Boxtown complain that the fumes released by xAI’s “Colossus” data canter are so overwhelming that it’s making it hard for them to breathe. There, xAI also deployed dozens of gas-powered turbines to get the facility up and running without permits, quickly turning the site into one of the largest emitters of smog-producing nitrogen oxides in the surrounding county, Politico reported last May.
Some Southaven residents might take issue with Musselwhite’s framing that their critiques are politically motivated. The 76-year-old Eddie Gossett, who lives on the same road as the xAI facility, supported Musk’s initiatives to slash federal spending through DOGE. But even he complains that he can’t sleep because of the roar of the turbines.
Gossett had a suggestion for Musk: “You need to come over and stay at my house for a week,” he told NBC.
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