Data Centers
Trump Admin Backs Musk in Data Center Fight against NAACP; Says xAI’s South Memphis Data Center Critical to Military Efforts
The Trump Administration is demanding a federal judge either let it jump into a lawsuit by the NAACP against Elon Musk’s AI company over a South Memphis data center, or put the case on hold so it can appeal any exclusion to higher courts.
In a motion to U.S. District Court Judge Debra Brown, administration lawyers said the NAACP has no right to even bring an action against Musk’s xAI (now owned by SpaceX), and that it’s putting U.S. national security at risk.
“…NAACP is usurping federal enforcement authority and threatening national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut down a power facility needed for artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations.”
The motion was filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi.
At issue is Musk’s data center, which sits near the Mississippi community of Southaven. The data center runs on diesel generators, which the NAACP says is in violation of the Clean Air Act. While the act allows for citizen lawsuits, the Trump Administration and state of Mississippi argue that’s only if the federal government opts to do nothing.
In this case, both the Trump administration – through EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin – and Mississippi say the xAI diesel generators are fine.
Judge Brown has indicated she would schedule a hearing on the NAACP suit in October. While the EPA filed a motion to intervene in the case last month, the judge has not yet ruled either way. The EPA is demanding she issue a ruling by Sept. 10 or adjourn the case so it can ask for an appellate court review.
“The United States has already suffered harm by being excluded from the proceedings in this case because, while the parties diligently prepare for a hearing on Plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction, the United States has not been allowed to participate,” federal lawyers wrote in their motion to Judge Brown.
“That harm will be magnified if the Court further postpones ruling on the amended motion while scheduling a preliminary injunction hearing with the parties. Despite the United States’ unambiguous statutory right to intervene, the Court has not granted it intervention or otherwise ruled on the amended motion. Yet the Court has stressed its plan to not delay the proposed October preliminary injunction hearing.”
Read the Original Complaint here
The case is controversial for a number of reasons. Not only is the data center run by an Elon Musk-run company, but its use of diesel generators is an outlier for a large data center. Companies will often deploy diesel while awaiting a hookup to the power grid.
With a large population of Blacks in the Southaven area of Mississippi protesting the air pollution caused by the diesel generators, the NAACP filed its lawsuit in an effort to protect members of the organization who live there.
Musk’s xAI is now a part of his SpaceX company, which this summer launched a widely watched Initial Public Offering and has seen its stock gyrate wildly on Wall Street. After the IPO, Musk briefly reached trillionaire status.
Should the courts rule in favor of the NAACP, it would mark a significant setback for Musk—as his empire, xAI, SpaceX, Tesla, and the X social media platform, is leaning heavily into a Data Center-AI model.
Musk himself briefly worked as an unpaid member of the Trump administration, heading up its DOGE cost-slashing unit for the better part of a year.