People in a Mississippi neighborhood, many of whom dislike a nearby power plant central to Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence ambitions, have received a stark offer – to sell their houses to his company and make way. Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of xAI, Musk’s AI company that was folded into the SpaceX entity in February, touting a deal to purchase houses as long as the owners agree to not join a lawsuit against the company over the power plant’s noise. This plan could potentially swallow up almost the entire neighborhood of Colonial Hills, on the western flank of Southaven.
A realtor told one resident there is a target to purchase 418 homes, with 18 homeowners already agreeing to sell, according to a recording of a conversation heard by the Guardian. xAI did not respond to questions over these numbers and its plans for the neighborhood and has previously said it intends to be be a good neighbor; it denies all claims in the noise lawsuit. The homes, the realtor and the local mayor say, will house xAI staff as the company continues its explosive expansion in the area, with three of its datacenters springing up in Southaven and adjoining Memphis, Tennessee, in just the past two years. This frantic pace, and the all-hours noise from gas turbines installed without permits to power the datacenters, has dismayed some locals.
I sometimes have to just get away from it because it makes me so angry.” Rose said she was shocked when the power plant, a former Duke Energy site housing 69 temporary gas turbines to feed the new datacenters, began its low-level growl in August last year. It will become Elon Musk’s little playground, basically. Elonville.” The market value offers for these homes, in an area where the average house price is about $180,000, is a comparatively small outlay in creating the world’s largest cluster of AI supercomputers as envisioned by Musk, a technologist who is the world’s richest person and a major Republican donor.
Since July 2024, xAI has constructed three vast datacenters – called Colossus I, Colossus II and Macrohardrr – in the Memphis and Southaven conurbation, which sprawls across Tennessee’s border with Mississippi. Musk is currently spending up to four nights a week in an Airstream trailer in the Memphis area as he personally oversees the build-out of the datacenters to further develop the Grok AI chatbot. As is common in the broader grassroots backlash against datacenters, however, some residents in Southaven say they have been trampled upon in this gold rush.
Three locals, anguished by the din of expansion, filed a lawsuit in June complaining of “near-constant noise, vibrations and other nuisance-level harms” from the nearby xAI power plant. Jason Haley, one of the three plaintiffs, said he never considered himself an activist or political in any way but has been driven to distraction by the noise of the gas turbines that sit about half a mile from his home, which he has owned for the past 20 years. You also lose hope because you’re being ignored or dismissed.
There’s no escape.” Exasperated by fruitless exchanges with Southaven’s mayor and enraged by Tate Reeves, the Republican, pro-AI Mississippi governor, claiming that a curb on datacenters are “surrendering the future of technology to China”, Haley lodged the lawsuit and started posting videos on social media of himself monitoring the rumbling noise levels. But our governor saying I don’t love America because I don’t like being tortured by noise? That is just asinine and ignorant.
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