If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally and criminally liable in such cases.
For example, if a data center is illegally running gas turbines, the penalty could be that the data center must be shut down for 3 years and no equipment can be removed from the data center during that time.
With financial penalties, there's always calculus on whether the penalty is high enough to deter the action. But the only reason they'd want to, for example, use illegal power generators at a data center is to run the data center. Losing access to 100% of the value of that data center for 3 years would make the calculus easy: it wouldn't be worth it for the companies. They'd lose the entire reason for doing it and so much of the capital investment in equipment as it depreciated during those 3 years.
With AI companies believing the market is worth trillions, it's hard to imagine a financial penalty high enough to deter illegal actions. It might need to be in the hundreds of billions - a level which they probably can't pay given their current resources and which governments wouldn't levy. Not that they'll essentially confiscate a data center and its hardware for multiple years as a penalty either.
Taxi Pendants? Never heard of her
- Uber/Lyft
Gambling laws? Pssht
- Polymarkets
This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
I don't like Grok or xAI. Or X. Or Twitter before.
I also don't like articles that try to bias readers with irrelevant details:
> This includes Grok, which has thus far been involved in controversies including but not limited to:
> Spreading antisemitic slurs and conspiracies while calling itself "Mecha-Hitler"
> Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children
> Acting as a mouthpiece for Elon's racist belief in South African white genocide
I stopped reading right there.
Just a reminder that when you're building a business, having land and a datacenter ready and cannot be switched on, with idle staff, costs the business money.
xAI could only draw 7-8MW from the grid and needed to run 10s of 1000s of H1000s. They shipped in 15 gas turbines as a more permanent onsite power plant while TVA/MLGW worked on expanding the grid supply to 150-300MW.
So you can get upset at musk all you want, but he has a business to run, and waiting for a full grid build out isn't practical.
Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.
Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.
Do we punish other crimes?
And the government would have to pay to fight and might be on the hook if they lost.
And “clearly breaking the law” isn’t always clear; I don’t k ow anything about this particular case but it sounds like zoning or applying utility laws to non-utility companies or environmental regulations being used to make construction financially untenable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for opposition to off-grid natural gas turbines; you don’t get much cleaner off grid power that works 24x7.
> TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead.
From everything I've seen the populist uprising is happening because 99% of the people shouting don't know anything about data centers other than "bad".
— Upton Sinclair
>xAI Ignores Laws And Profits: Rules For Thee, Not For Me
To what it is now, as if this is just healthy competition.
I never supported what Uber, either. Why would you assume anyone did?
If that were true, no one would go to jail for marijuana possession.
The government has no obligation to apply the law equally, although they are prohibited from applying the law unequally to achieve certain discriminatory aims.
I wish I lived in your world.
Bring it on. Data center developers are getting government officials to sign NDAs as an end-run around the democratic process (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/04/opinion/ezra-klein-podcas...).
And that sounds like pro-datacenter corruption to me, and it's way better documented that the aspersions you're casting.
> there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects
That's bullshit. About the only thing Americans agree on is that they hate datacenters: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/12/opinion/data-center-ai-de...:
> Americans hate data centers. They really, really hate them.
A Gallup poll from May found that 71 percent of Americans would oppose a data center being built in their area. In rural communities in Utah and North Carolina, regular people are organizing to stop data center construction, speaking out at public hearings and pressuring politicians for bans....
> According to polling by Heatmap News, more than half of all Americans support a national ban on data centers. The public seems to agree that data centers are giant, ugly, noisy, smelly altars to industrial-scale hostile architecture. In our virulently partisan country, this constitutes a rare show of consensus.
Comments that people don't like, which are clearly not just "spam" get flagged all the time. It's ridiculous
I mean, that's the good faith argument anyways. I suspect you don't actually care, and just also believe in South African white genocide etc.
Starlink v3 satelites launch next month, the first starmind sats based nvidia chips sometime next year, large new factories for the needed solar panels are already half built outside of bastrop texas
Take Hood County where a Texas senator prevented them from considering a construction pause. Or West Virginia’s Power Generation and Consumption Act which completely banned local government oversight. Or Georgia’s HB 1059 Siting Mandates. I could go on and on but the point here is the playing field is not level. These data centers often have the power to completely skirt local zoning laws and regulation. And even when they do it illegally, there's rarely any consequences
You realize there are fully autonomous waymo cabs operating at "level 4" in several regions... today. Anybody can download the app and ride in them now.
Google didn't go around promising this "next year" every year for the last decade. They just went out and did the work to make the product work, and released it.
If the article were about Elon Musk's racist views, then by all means I'd be fine with it. But his (or Grok's) racism is irrelevant to the laws he is violating. Would it be OK if a well respected billionaire flouted those laws?
This is what I'm talking about. A non-profit and random journalists shouldn't be the ones holding them accountable in the first place. And a "lawsuit" is hardly accountability either. People need to go to prison for white collar crime.
> Enter the Federal Government and the Department of Justice, who pushed the courts to dismiss the suit as a matter of national security, stating that the xAI models were needed for "artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations." So, residents are left without legal means of contesting these developments, barring individual claims and damages.
And this is the reason why a "lawsuit" isn't accountability. When the company can just pay some politicians to get it dismissed.
> It would be bad enough if the data center was used to research cures to cancer, but instead it is creating nudes of children.
Sorry, but what it is being used for is irrelevant to whether it is flouting the laws.
As I said in my original comment, the reason I stopped reading was because the language was trying to bias readers. And as the responses show, they sure as Hell did.
It seems critical reading is becoming a lost skill.
Most people believe that the law should mirror the ethics or morality of the society, and absent something clearly harmful, most people don’t understand why something with nobody clearly harmed should be illegal.
It's like criticizing Stallman's hygiene. Who cares?
Completely disagree. That sort of reasoning is why plenty of African Americans were forcibly moved from their own properties in the 20th century. "The land will be put to great use!" (And in a lot of cases, it was - still wrong).
Are you trying to invent your own definition for self driving and quibble that supervision negates what the car is doing?
And yeah, on some level it's not strictly relevant to the exact legal question being discussed, but part of the purpose of an article is to give you reasons to give a shit about what's being reported.
When they first started talking about it in the mid-teens, it was pitched as "read a book or take a nap"
That is not what Tesla is selling in 2026.
Within your metaphor, the person I'm replying to would say "I did nothing to stop the land theft because I found it annoying how people made irrelevant arguments about what the land would be used for". Really calls into question if their real position is what they say it is.
That is an example of ignoring laws and regulations. So that is certainly relevant as context to the current case where the company is ignoring laws and regulations.
If I own a house and am not paying property taxes on it, the fact that I'm murdering people in that house is irrelevant.
Flipping it around: Can you tell me why I need to interact with such articles? What did I lose by not reading it? I can certainly tell you what I gained.
Neither I, nor the person you're responding to (tommica) suggested anything of the sort.
>These racks are needed to keep up with the ballooning requirements of each new "frontier" (a buzzword label with no actual inclination of performance of improvement) model developed, which everyone bought into the AI hype will immediately hop to because it's all novelty over utility.
This is a mind-blowingly clueless assertion. This is not a person capable of rationally assessing facts. At best this kind of writing is interesting as an artifict of human delusion and cognitive bias.
Elon (or Grok) espousing racist views is not flouting data center related regulations. His business practices are.
And this is where the article is trying to bias the readers.
As I said elsewhere: If this article was "Elon Musk is a shitty guy, and look at all the shitty stuff he does", I'd have no objection to any of this. Present all the examples, make the case, and let the reader decide.
But showing someone violating the law, and then pointing out possible other unrelated violations, you're trying to bias the reader.
If this were on trial and I were on the jury, and the prosecutor used such tactics, I'd be biased against the prosecution. There's a very good reason defense attorneys get judges to rule that such stuff can not be presented to the jurors.
You can introduce that person to the concept of "strawman".
Not reading an article does not equate to any of the following: Support, Opposition, Neutrality, Apathy, Indifference.
OK. Let me ask you: Is the article about those laws and regulations?
I'm well aware of all these problems. They are simply not relevant to data center violations.
Again: Stallman having bad hygiene is irrelevant to whether his opinions on various matters is problematic.
How do you figure? This description would be best applied to you:
* Musk both wildly wealthy because of his popularity and simultaneously incompetent
* Musk and other investors have made boatloads of money off the promise that specifically american, boutique LLMs will deliver labor savings. in his case spaces, but it's indistinguishable from similar frauds such as eg openai, anthropic, etc
* Musk's properties will likely collapse unless they can find new revenue or investors.
Musk can only grift so many people before his bottom falls out
In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. xAI gets to flout economic planning and restrictions that any normal group would have to follow, all for the sake of being able to get another fuckass data center built in record time. In the meantime, real people will face declining health and increased pollution. This is not a new story, but it's worth telling anyway.
For those blissfully unaware, xAI is the subsidiary of SpaceX (previously under X, which itself was previously Twitter) that is in charge of AI development and data centers for the xAI series of products. This includes Grok, which has thus far been involved in controversies including but not limited to:
Beyond that, xAI has also been happy to partner with the federal government for the use of its models across agencies including the Department of Defense (come on, enough with this Department of War shit). Now with a product like that, you might be surprised to learn that some people aren't jazzed about its continuing development and growth, especially when it spews smog in their backyard. xAI continues to barge forward however; decriers be damned in the name of "progress".
The AI models keep expanding, requiring more memory and cores for what "improvements" there are. So the name of the game right now is data centers; acres and acres of computer racks, loaded with the best money hardware can buy (and some less so, given the current supply crunch). These racks are needed to keep up with the ballooning requirements of each new "frontier" (a buzzword label with no actual inclination of performance of improvement) model developed, which everyone bought into the AI hype will immediately hop to because it's all novelty over utility.
The Colossus I Data Center was brought online in 122 days from breaking ground to operation. Some hail that as an achievement, but others (like myself) see it as a brutal pace to avoid having to answer pesky questions like "How will this affect the nearby area?" and "What sort of mitigation plans to do you have for the data center's waste?" The data center is powered by dozens of unpermitted gas turbines, which they initially refused to acknowledge were running until journalists and groups used thermal imaging to prove they were indeed on and spewing toxins into the air (including smog, formaldehyde, and other nasty things). This resulted in a suit from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) on behalf of the NAACP for violations of the Clean Air Act. Their claim was that the company operated without public oversight or accountability for these illegal constructions and sought legal stoppage until proper accounting can be done of the effects of said turbines.
Enter the Federal Government and the Department of Justice, who pushed the courts to dismiss the suit as a matter of national security, stating that the xAI models were needed for "artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations." So, residents are left without legal means of contesting these developments, barring individual claims and damages.
This all brings us to July 30, 2026, where xAI announced that the company had entered an agreement with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality (as it sits on the border of Tennessee and Mississippi) that it will complete removal of the "temporary" turbines (now online for 2 years) and replace them with a natural gas power plant by July 2027. This reads, to me at least, as a swift stomp on the balls of the nearby area for several reasons. First, it seems all but certain they will face no punishment for spewing toxins into the environment for the past years because this is now in a timeline agreed upon by the state, with no announcement of any fines or actions.
Embarassingly, they can't seem to get their propaganda straight either, as in their update on the construction where they announced the agreement, they specify "69... temporary, mobile turbines that currently power our facility in Southaven, Mississippi." This seems at odds with their "Fact V. Fiction" FAQ linked at the bottom of the page, which contains a string of statements I truly can't make heads or tales of. Please check out the link and we'll reconvene to talk about what it says.
So according to statement one, there were temporary turbines, but they were moved to an extremely nearby different site, and then they were removed. They applied for 15 permanent turbines, still running the temporary ones in the meantime, and received approval 6 months+ later. However, they won't need that many, and they'll only be backup, so they'll primarily (assumedly) be drawing from the local power grid. The next statement clarifies that there won't be any turbines at Memphis data center; they'll be down the road at Electrolux, connected via substation that talk about spending millions to build in statement seven. In statement two, they say that there's nowhere near 90 turbines at its next data center (a number significantly higher than any I've seen in these conversations, most likely to make them sound silly), and say that they'll not have any turbines at the new one (because it'll be wired in to all the turbines they have elsewhere).
They'll eventually be hooked into the grid according to the statement three, and they will draw from it but have battery and turbine backup if things get overdrawn according to statement five. There's then extremely careful wording in statement six where they contest "Colossus will be one of the largest emissions sources in Memphis" by stating "actually we'll be using state-of-the-art to reduce emissions" but then stops short of saying "and thus the statement is wrong", probably because even with the fancy tech it still will be highly polluting.
So after all these words and attempts to clear the air, the only thing I'm confident in is that they absolutely, desperately do not want to directly discuss their overall plans for these sites. They make every opportunity to speak around and negate concerns, without really clarifying the extent of anything barring the 12 (claimed) permanent turbines at Electrolux and two power substations. I guess they also do claim the wastewater treatment was supposed to come online in 2026, however officials were told last month that construction on the site isn't even supposed to restart until Q12027. In the meantime, they will continue to drain the area's aquifer. It is unclear how long they need to complete it.
I, and other smarter people, would attribute the location of this data center, and its use of unpermitted gas generators which it denied for months existed or being used, to institutional and historic racism. See, Memphis is a majority Black population, who historically have been redlined to more industrial and polluted areas such as these across the country. This is a known issue to this day, where minority heavy neighborhoods will be subject to worse pollution and health outcomes than similar, whiter areas. This includes things like this exact situation, where the development of health hazards such as data centers are allowed only in less affluent and darker communities. The situation in Memphis is actually worse than I thought, as there somewhere in the range of 10-15 data centers in the outlying Memphis area where people very much do live.
The physical pollution coming from Colossus' 69 gas generators is one thing that indisputably will hurt the environment around the area and its residents. However, there's growing concern around audio or sonic pollution and the effects it has on flora, fauna, and people in the area. That type of pollution can include easy-to-identify things, like the loud sounds of construction or machinery moving then disrupting sleep and normal life, but it also includes infrasonic pollution, or audio that is below the range of human hearing (sub 20mhz). Despite humans not being able to hear it, there's growing academic and other research that show these sounds can and do have very direct negative health effects, up to several miles away. This can include things like a general sense of unease all the way to debilitating migraines, nausea, and other symptoms. The fact that these sort of symptoms have been reported across many communities that have had data centers pop up and this data center (plus at least one more from xAI alone to come) were allowed to be be built so close to housing shows a damning disregard for the health and well-being of the people living there.
This is the Silicon Valley ethos used to justify harm in the name of "progress". It's one thing when it's contained to Silicon Valley or on the worldwide web, it's another when it comes to your backyard or to the health of entire communities. The pollution, amongst everything else, will have clear and quantifiable harm to the communities surrounding these new data centers. Normal, smaller developments are bound by permits and hearings and the like. These permits require impact reports or citizens to sound off on the ways that it will effect them. Clear, traceable paths where developers can be held liable for deadlines, emissions, and negative outcomes.
xAI faces none of those things. Their developments are draped in shadow and purposefully not publicized because they are aware of how bad what they're doing is. They hope that if they just refuse to talk about it long enough, eventually we'll just accept this as the price of progress and let them off the hook for purposefully making life worse for a considerable amount of people. All this for the war crime and child porn generator; for something that's being used to harass women online right now. All this for something a majority of people don't even want; to add to the bottom line of SpaceX. We should not be willing to overlook the human and environmental costs for a company to profit. We've done that far too long, and look where we are now; talking about a bunch of illegal generators stood up to make the racism machine work more gooder.
Are you reading any of my comments? I'm having trouble tying your question to anything I've said so far.
That's the topic here. You don't think someone flouting regulations on distribution of internet content won't flout data center regulations?