SpaceXAI powers down 11 of 69 temporary turbines at Southaven facility

SpaceXAI said Monday it has powered down 11 of 69 temporary turbines that have been supplying power to its Southaven, Mississippi, data center as it transitions to a permanent 1.2-gigawatt power plant.

The company said it will continue to remove the temporary, mobile turbines over the next year as the new plant comes online under a Clean Air Act permit. SpaceXAI said the permanent plant will consist of 41 authorized permanent turbines and that the permit was granted in March 2026.

Complaints about noise from the turbines prompted a class-action lawsuit filed by Jason Haley, Preston Herrington and Taylor Logsdon in the U.S. District Court for the North District of Mississippi, according to the plaintiffs’ court filing. The plaintiffs allege the noise has been disruptive to their daily lives.

SpaceXAI said it entered an agreed order with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality in July establishing a fixed timeline for removal of all 69 temporary turbines. The company said all temporary turbines will be removed by July 2027.

The company also said it has invested in emission controls and noise mitigation, including selective catalytic reduction devices and “millions of dollars” in sound walls, silencers and next-generation turbines with advanced quieting technologies. “Current monitoring shows that local air quality continues to meet or exceed EPA standards,” the company said, and added it regularly reconfigures operations to reduce noise.

SpaceXAI said earlier this year it acquired xAI, the operator of the Colossus datacenters on the Tennessee-Mississippi state line. The company said the Southaven site is designed to support training large-scale AI models such as Grok and that it plans to equip the facility with 1 million GPUs to boost AI performance.

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