Elon Musk-led xAI has deployed 19 natural gas turbines at its second data center facility in Southaven, Mississippi, in the past two months.

In emails obtained via a public records request by the Southern Environmental Law Center from an official in the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality and a representative from Trinity Consultants, Wired reports that the company installed 19 portable gas turbines at the site between late March and early May. This brings the total number of natural gas units at the site to 46.

Reports suggest that the combined 19 turbines offer more than 500MW of capacity for the data center. xAI did not respond to Wired's request for comment. In March, the company secured permission to install 41 natural gas turbines at the site to power its Colossus 2 data center. However, the latest installation seems to break that threshold.

xAI's main data center portfolio is in Memphis, Tennessee, which it uses to power its Grok AI chatbot. The company came to Memphis in 2024, launching its Colossus supercomputer in a new data center housed in a former Electrolux factory in Memphis’s Boxtown district.

It purchased the site for Colossus 2 last March, and the data center came online in January. Despite Musk claiming it offered 1GW of capacity at launch, satellite imagery taken in January reportedly showed it had cooling equipment installed capable of managing 350MW.

A third data center is in the works, located in Southaven, and the company is also spending $659m on another building to be constructed on an adjacent land parcel.

Musk says his company, which is now part of SpaceX, will eventually have access to 2GW of compute power from the cluster, and the gas turbines will be key to supplying this.

The company’s use of gas turbines in Memphis has been the subject of much controversy, with environmental and civil rights campaigners claiming that xAI installed the machines before the correct permits were in place, and stating that they are impacting air quality in what is one of the area’s poorest neighborhoods.

The company is currently facing a lawsuit from the SELC and other environmental non-profits over the deployment of the turbines.

Earlier this month, it was announced that generative AI company Anthropic plans to use all of the compute capacity at xAI's Colossus 1 data center as part of a partnership with SpaceX.