SpaceX Delays Removing xAI's 69 Memphis Turbines Until 2027

A year is a long time to keep 69 unpermitted gas turbines running in one of the most polluted parts of the country. That is what SpaceX has now told regulators it plans to do. TechCrunch reports that SpaceX, which acquired xAI in February 2026, is currently operating 69 gas turbines to power the Colossus data centers south of Memphis in Mississippi, and that the fleet will not be fully removed until July 2027.

The replacement is not small. SpaceX is building a permanent 1.2 gigawatt natural gas plant on the site, with 41 turbines ranging from 16.48 to 50 megawatts each, and the company's IPO filing says it plans to buy $2.8 billion of gas turbines for its data centers over the next three years. That is the scale of a mid-sized peaker fleet, procured by a single AI operator, for a single training campus.

Why this is not only a Memphis story is what has already happened in court. The NAACP and the Southern Environmental Law Center have sued xAI over the unpermitted turbines, and the Department of Justice sided with SpaceX, calling the turbines a matter of national, economic, and energy security. Air-permit disputes are usually a local regulator's problem. When the DOJ shows up with a national-security argument, the template shifts for every hyperscaler racing to add gigawatts.

The honest caveat is that the account is largely SpaceX's own filing. The reporting does not spell out what emissions controls, if any, the 69 units will run with during the extra year, nor who is actually positioned to enforce a shorter timeline if the plaintiffs prevail, nor where the temporary turbines end up when they come out. What will keep the case alive is the company's own figure that the units have the potential to emit more than 2,000 tons of smog-forming NOx per year in one of America's most polluted regions.

If this framing holds, "we needed the compute" becomes a durable legal argument for skipping local air permitting, and the useful place to watch is whether other AI-driven data-center buildouts start citing the same DOJ position when their own permits slip.