The Turbines Nobody Permitted
xAI has been running its Colossus 2 supercomputer — the machine that trains and serves Grok — on trailer-mounted gas turbines in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line from Memphis. The turbines are classified as "mobile" equipment, a designation that lets them sidestep standard Clean Air Act permitting. The NAACP, joined by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, sued in April. Two communities sit in range: Southaven, and Boxtown, a Memphis neighborhood founded by freedmen in 1863. Both are majority-Black.
The turbine count has grown during the litigation itself — roughly 27 at filing in April, 33 to 35 by mid-June, 57 to 59 by July, depending on which outlet's count you read (Utility Dive, Electrek, ESG Dive, and others have each reported different snapshots as the case progressed). That spread reflects the litigation record's own progression, not a single confirmed figure — treat any specific number in this dispatch as tied to the date it was reported, not as a current live count.
The Justice Department Steps In — For the Defendant
On June 15 and 16, DOJ's Environment and Natural Resources Division moved to intervene in the case — not on behalf of the public the Clean Air Act protects, but to ask the court to dismiss the suit outright. The government's argument: a win for the plaintiffs would threaten American national, economic, and energy security. DOJ made its position public in its own press release, titled "Justice Department Files to Intervene and Dismiss Lawsuit that Would Hamper America's AI Innovation and Security."
The Pentagon's own Chief Digital and AI Officer, Cameron Stanley, filed a declaration in the case. Stanley wrote that Grok "enabled U.S. forces to deploy over 2,000 munitions to 2,000 distinct targets within 96 hours" during operations in the Iran war, and described the Colossus 2 facility as "vital" to targeting, intelligence, readiness, and recruitment missions — the Pentagon's first public disclosure that it runs a dedicated Grok Gov product for federal agencies.
Erika Kranz, a Harvard Law senior staff attorney who tracks citizen-suit litigation, called this the first time the U.S. government has intervened in a citizen suit against a private defendant specifically to ask that the suit be dismissed. Earthjustice's own attorney on the case, Laura Thoms, is herself a DOJ Environment and Natural Resources Division alumna.
Musk's Math
Elon Musk spent more than $250 million electing Trump in 2024 — the largest single donation of that cycle. In February of this year, xAI merged into SpaceX, meaning the company DOJ is now defending in federal court and the company holding the Golden Dome contracts are, as of this year, the same corporate entity. SpaceX debuted on Nasdaq June 12, 2026 and closed its first trading day at a roughly $2.1 trillion market capitalization, up 19% from its IPO price. And Grok itself, by most independent measures, trails OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic's frontier models — a detail that undercuts the "irreplaceable to national security" framing on its own terms, before anyone even gets to the donation. Orbit →
Adjacent, Not Yet Linked
On May 14, Musk personally — not a company; he's the named buyer on the federal filing — acquired APR Energy, a mobile gas-turbine fleet worth roughly $1 billion, deployable in weeks, with more than a gigawatt of capacity. The deal surfaced only through an FTC early-termination filing; neither Musk nor xAI has said where the fleet will go. It is not established that this fleet has anything to do with the Southaven turbines. Treat it as a second, related fact until a filing connects the two — not as the same story. Suspects →
The Old Goat will revisit this dispatch from time to time to verify what's written here, and leaves it to the reader to draw their own conclusions from the information presented.