SpaceX Is Building a Power Plant for xAI's Colossus, but the Unpermitted Turbines Will Run for Another Year

SpaceX is building a new power plant for xAI's Colossus data centers, but the existing unpermitted gas turbines will not be removed for at least another year, TechCrunch reports.

Why the turbines are controversial

Colossus is the supercomputer cluster run by Elon Musk's xAI in Memphis, Tennessee. To bring the facility online in record time, xAI installed gas turbines to power the data centers without obtaining the required permits for air pollutant emissions. Memphis has historically ranked among the US cities with a heavy air-quality burden, so the installation of illegal emission sources drew a sharp reaction from local residents and environmental groups.

Key facts:

• The unpermitted turbines were installed to power the xAI Colossus data centers in Memphis, Tennessee
• SpaceX is building a new power plant — a permanent, legal energy source for the cluster
• Removal of the existing turbines will not be completed for at least a year, according to TechCrunch
• Both xAI and SpaceX are controlled by Elon Musk

What SpaceX is building and why

SpaceX is acting as the contractor on the new power plant, which is meant to replace the temporary power setup with legal infrastructure. But construction timelines are stretching: according to TechCrunch, the unpermitted turbines will keep running for many more months — and the outlet's headline names the horizon explicitly as "another year."

For Musk, the situation poses a two-sided management problem. xAI urgently needs compute to train its Grok models, while SpaceX must build out the power infrastructure without violating environmental law. Until those two tracks converge, Memphis residents live in a state of environmental uncertainty.

What this means

The xAI Colossus case is a telling example of a systemic contradiction in the AI compute race: companies rush to launch the world's largest clusters, outpacing their own permitting and infrastructure processes. Even with a plan to legalize the setup — a new power plant — fixing the violations takes years, not weeks. For regulators and local communities, this raises the question of whether existing oversight mechanisms are enough to keep pace with the speed of AI infrastructure deployment.