Colossus 1 datacenter is the one using illegal power, is poisoning the air for poor communities near Memphis, and is potentially poisoning the water. It's likely the additional demand on the grid will cause massive blackouts during extreme weather events, putting residents at further risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_(supercomputer)#Envir...
So you can put Anthropic on your list of companies that like to talk big about safety, but when the rubber hits the road, profits matter more than safety.
Illegal is a strong term here. While the wiki link you included indicates there might be some permitting nuances, I've seen nothing claiming the power is "illegal."
xAI removed its illegal gas turbines and obtained permits for the others only after being sued by the Southern Environmental Law Center. They then built another unpermitted site (Colossus 2) across the state line in Mississippi, and they are being sued again. [0]
"The company began operations at its first site, Colossus 1, in June of 2024 and used as many as 35 unpermitted gas turbines to power the facility. Despite receiving intense public pushback over the use of illegal turbines and the lack of public input and transparency around Colossus 1, xAI officials said it planned on “copying and pasting” its unlawful turbine strategy to power Colossus 2."
"xAI removed its unpermitted turbines at the Colossus 1 data center after SELC, on behalf of the NAACP, sent a notice of intent to sue under the Clean Air Act. The company obtained permits for its remaining 15 turbines."
[0] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
They did not require permits at the time as they were portable Think transport trailer sized. If you use portable power for under 365 days a year, an epa permit was not required. They changed the rules on permitting after and xAI complied
Yes, I believe it's xAI's position that they were technically in compliance at the time. I don't know that a judge would agree. The new EPA rule is more of a clarification; they do not concede that point.
what EPA?
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Proper utility scale gas generators come with proper utility scale pollution controls to make sure nasties like fine particulate and NO is filtered or properly reduced into some much less harmful to human health.
CO2 is bad for us long term. But there are plenty of other nasty combustion products that are extremely bad for humans in the short term. Which is why we have pollution and air quality regulations.
Portable generators don’t meet any of the stronger requirements that utility scale systems have to meet, because it’s assumed they’re only operated in small numbers for short periods of time. They’re not designed to safe to operate in large numbers over long periods of time in the same place. For that you need proper pollution controls
If you are burning that much fuel it needs to have emissions regulations. How would you feel if 20 miles upwind of you somebody fired up a few hundred random gas generators and kept them running 24/7 with no emission controls on them, rather than using utility power which is far cleaner and more efficient?
Public power utilities get permits for their operations. xAI tried to get around permitting regulations and environmental laws by claiming the generators were temporary, got sued [0], and even the Trump administration's EPA ruled against them [1]. They are also now trying to do it again in another state with Colossus 2 [2].
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2025/06/18/xai-is-facing-a-lawsuit-fo...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jan/15/elon-musk...
[2] https://www.selc.org/news/xai-built-an-illegal-power-plant-t...
The ethics are questionable, legal or not. Anthropic are tarnishing their image again here.
Not sure how much it hurts then compared to blocking openclaw though.
I don't quite understand the business logic behind "blocking" openclaw (you can still use it at API rates) but I never saw how this was unethical. Anthropic has no ethical obligation to support other people's software
Blocking openclaw made everyone realise that what anthropic giveth, anthropic can take away.
It is similar to the xAI gas turbines in that it tarnished their image - at least amongst those naive people who saw them as a plucky startup rather than a profit seeking corporation who don't like competition.
I agree with you that the ethics are very different.
I don't get it. On the one hand we had Steve Jobs saying "No App Store!" and everyone getting up in arms, then here we have "no obligation to have Anthropic support other people's software," and that being OK. So which is it? Or does the answer change daily depending on what makes us feel good?
I find the ethics of power generation, resource use, and pollution in a world struggling with climate change to be more of a challenge than whether a few people can run some software. And that’s coming from a Claude user that’s getting tired of their shenanigans.
from perplexity deep research: "Colossus‑related gas‑turbine power plants have been run in ways alleged to violate the Clean Air Act, in already over‑polluted Black and low‑income communities near Memphis, and Anthropic has now become the main user of that infrastructure."
sources: https://www.tba.org/?pg=Hastings2025AIX (Tech, Toxins, and Memphis: Evaluating the Environmental Footprint of the xAI Facility)
Any specifics? What are they doing and what statutes are allegedly being violated?
Emphasis my own:
> "The xAI facility has already deployed *nearly 20 gas turbines, including four large units with a combined capacity of 100MW*, to power its AI system Grok... There are plans to add *15 more gas turbines between June 2025 and June 2030*, and the turbine application projects *annual emissions of around 11.51 tons of hazardous air pollutants*."
> "it is currently *running gas turbines without the necessary permits from the Shelby County Health Department*"
> "findings from the Southern Environmental Law Center indicate that the facility has 'installed' gas turbines. This suggests that new industrial systems are in place and that *xAI is obligated to comply with the new NSPS* [New Source Performance Standards] *to avoid violating the Clean Air Act*"
> "NSPS are authorized under *Section 211 of the Clean Air Act*... All new sources must comply with the *Best System of Emission Reduction (BSER)*, which mandates the use of state-of-the-art technology to minimize air pollutants."
> "there is a history of Elon Musk's companies, such as *SpaceX and the Boring Company, being fined thousands of dollars for violating environmental law* to circumvent regulation"
I wonder what the pollution from these gas turbines is like. SO2 from trace sulfur compounds? Is it much worse than a traditional gas-fired power plant for some reason? I can't imagine it would be but I have to plead ignorance and beg for hints here.
Well, from a quick bit of searching it looks like it's all NOxes. There are supposed to be known ways of mitigating NOx formation [1][2] but there enough dependencies that I'm not going to do any more digging.
1. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/nox-reduction-technologies-ga...
2. PDF: https://www.ifc.org/content/dam/ifc/doc/1990/handbook-nitrog...
So they haven't gotten permits, but why? Why where the permits denied?
Just the other day we had news that some Californian environment protection agency denied permits for SpaceX for political reasons as opposed to following objective rules, as ruled by a judge. So the fact that some permits were not issued doesn't tell me anything.
To my understanding: the permits weren't denied, they were never applied for.
Edit: I re-read https://www.tba.org/?pg=Hastings2025AIX and yes, it seems that xAI never applied for permits related to the gas turbines as they're making the argument that the permits aren't required.
Report from February 2026:
https://www.memphiscap.org/The southern environmental law center is a political action group, not a government agency.
I live in Memphis, none of this is true. What is true is that there is a concerted effort to smear anything related to xAI‘s presence in Memphis for some reason.
For some facts, the colossus data center is next-door to a steel mill and city sewage treatment plant, a vacated gigawatt scale coal power plant complete with nasty Coal Ash Ponds, and a brand new combined cycle gas power plant. The area is at the far edge of Memphis city limits up against the river, in a heavy industrial area. There’s even a major Valero oil refinery right there too.
Memphis has trillions and trillions of gallons of water, both in a gigantic underground aquifers and the Mississippi River itself. xAI has agreed to shed load in case of impending brownouts. The fear mongering is out of control.
They had a ton of portable turbines that were under operating under a temporary permit, and that was the disputed part. However, the blame should rest with TVA and or Memphis light gas and water for not being able to run an appropriate high voltage connection less than 1 mile from the plant to the data center in a timely manner. However… What difference does it make if the natural gas is burned at TVA plant or very similar gas turbines on site in the same neighborhood. Environmental groups and the county health department tried suing, was struck down, xAI works closely with the State, but the whining continues. xAI is paying gargantuan taxes to the city, no tax breaks.
These environmental groups do not care about the nasty unregulated cars burning oil, that I have to breathe every day. We terminated our motor vehicle inspection requirements due to the “burden” it places on the low income population. So they can burn their oil in my face, but then they sue to stop a SOTA turbine in an industrial area? There are junkyards in these same areas that burn their piles of waste tires every year or so “on accident”. No lawsuits there either.
We have similar issues here in Wisconsin. Especially when it comes to solar and battery storage facilities. I absolutely think there needs to be more regulations carved out for data centers, just as there is for any other industrial building, but yeah the great mongering is incredible to see. Especially when the argument of "save our beautiful farmlands" is brought up. Do you even know how nasty agricultural runoff is?
Agreed there is a huge effort to smear as much as possible. Between parent comment being very highly voted and Wikipedia page being militantly updated and seeing these tired, wrong talking points everywhere, it's pretty obvious
So I was just Googling this, and apparently most datacenters don't pay any state tax on revenue generated by said datacenter? Huge loophole if true, no wonder capital investment in datacenters is so high. [0]
[0] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/regulations/how-are-data...
I like how you said "googling this", but then didn't actually read the article you linked.
> In general, data centers only pay corporate income tax if they generate revenue. Not all data centers do this because many don’t sell goods or services; they simply house servers. By qualifying as business expenses rather than revenue generators, they reduce the tax liability of their parent companies.
> Thus, when it comes to income tax, at least, many data centers – especially hyperscale data centers owned by large companies – don’t generate tax revenue because they don’t generate direct operating income.
They pay property taxes. The best tax there is as of now (LVT when)
I would be surprised if these developments didn't have tax abatement clauses.
For a datacenter that generates billions, that is not much.
"The datacenter" doesn't generate billions. The computations performed inside might, but almost never is the datacenter owner the same person running the servers inside. The owner is just leasing space; selling electricity and cooling to a third-party company. Their margins (ie: taxable income) are thin because competition is high. A landlord's taxable income is not determined by his tenant's income.
You are being pedantic to pretend you don't understand. It's tiring and unproductive.
At the end of the day, people are paying money to utilize the servers within the datacenter. That money is revenue. That revenue ought to be taxed by the state.
it's in a former appliance factory that's right next to two pre-existing TVA power plants, a Nucor steel mill, and a sewage treatment facility. you've been lied to about how close it is to a residential area, just look at a map
"The independent study, conducted by EmPower Analytics Group and commissioned by the Southern Environmental Law Center, was led by a Harvard-trained environmental health scientist Dr. Michael Cork and shows that operation of xAI’s proposed permanent gas turbines would measurably increase health risks for families throughout the area—even in places as far away as Germantown and North Memphis." - https://www.memphiscap.org/
Air pollution travels.
> profits matter more than safety
For all the big talk from U.S.-Americans on European 'overregulation', they sure seem to have much more dystopian societal failure modes materialize.
Are you going to stop using Claude Code then?
Yes. Was that supposed to be a gotcha? Local models are becoming more useful, and I still remember how to write code.
Now that you have stopped using Claude Code, what have you replaced it with? Would love to know your setup. I am experimenting with local models too, but nothing comes close to Claude (Code), at least for me - not just for coding, mind you.
FWIW, if you want frontier-level performance, as it was a few months back, Deepseek v4 and K2.6 are there. Almost zero chance you can run them locally, but you do have choice in terms of providers.
Qwen-coder-next is considered SOTA for things you could actually run locally.
Not every allegation that appears in print is true. One should be very skeptical about these kinds of allegations, especially when there are deep-pocketed corporations involved who can be sued or pressured to settle in the face of sufficiently "plausible and persistent" (to borrow Hazlitt's term) claims of harm done by their operations.
How would a data centre poison the water? They don’t produce any chemicals or do anything.
> Data centers can inadvertently pollute water through chemical runoff from evaporative cooling systems, including biocides, corrosion inhibitors, and heavy metals that accumulate at scale when facilities discharge up to 5 million gallons daily.
Source: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/sustainability/4-strateg...
This is the specific water pollution issue: https://www.protectouraquifer.org/issues/xai-supercomputer
The plan was to develop a recycled wastewater facility, which will pull arsenic from contaminated shallow acquifers, and pump that into the drinking water supply's acquifers.
Get out of your bubble, my god.
Who cares about Memphis! We need more AI bro! /s
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"buddy" its so fitting your use of words for the complete lack of character buddy.