Filing: the US DOJ asks the court to dismiss an NAACP lawsuit over xAI's gas turbines, saying xAI is integral to the US' military operations, like the Iran War
In a bid to dismiss a lawsuit over xAI's polluting gas turbines, the Justice Department claimed the company is integral to military operations—including the Iran War.
WiredMolly Taft
Context & Ripple Effects
The dispute traces back to the NAACP’s planned challenge to xAI’s Memphis turbines over permitting and pollution concerns in predominantly Black neighborhoods. Memphis later granted an air permit for 15 turbines through 2027, but the underlying conflict has now reached federal court.
This filing also follows a broader pattern of Justice Department alignment with xAI in AI-related litigation, including its challenge to Colorado’s AI-discrimination law. The stated military role for Grok through GenAI.mil gives that alignment a national-security rationale in this case.
First-order effects
The DOJ’s dismissal request materially strengthens xAI’s defense against the NAACP suit by putting the federal government behind the argument that the company’s operations serve military needs.
The NAACP must now contest not only the turbine-related claims but also the DOJ’s assertion that disrupting xAI’s operations would affect US military activity.
Second-order effects
xAI’s Memphis expansion and planned increase in training capacity gain a more consequential legal backdrop: local environmental disputes can become entangled with federal defense priorities when the underlying compute is tied to military deployments.
Other AI developers seeking defense work may see closer federal support as strategically valuable, while communities and environmental advocates face a harder path where data-center infrastructure is characterized as operationally important to national security.
Third-order effects
If courts give substantial weight to military-use arguments in infrastructure disputes, defense-linked AI companies could gain a more durable advantage in siting and operating power-intensive compute facilities; the limits of that advantage will depend on judicial treatment of environmental and civil-rights claims.
The case points to a growing governance conflict: AI policy is no longer confined to model safety and discrimination rules, but increasingly includes who bears the local environmental costs of compute built for national-security use.
The trend: AI infrastructure is becoming strategic defense capacity, pulling environmental permitting, civil-rights challenges, and competition policy into a single national-security debate.
NEW: The Trump administration is weighing in on the lawsuit over xAI's gas turbines. It wants the suit tossed, arguing the turbines and Grok are critical to national security. Important late night scoop from @mollytaft.com
NEW: the US government intervened Monday on behalf of xAI in a lawsuit over its gas turbines, claiming that the company needs to run the turbines in order to power Grok, which is “vital” for national security — lots of wild stuff in the filing:
The “Department of Defense, details how the military relies on Grok's Gov model to ‘support vital national security missions.’ That includes using the model as part of recent strikes against Iran.” — Great @mollytaft.com story
U.S. government claiming Musk has the right to poison Memphis because xAI is “vital” to national security, because the Pentagon signed a contract with them. Elite immunity is a cancer that causes cancer, among countless other ills. www.wired.com/story/doj-la...
“Generative AI cannot dissociate itself from the processes of extractivism, automation, essentialism, surveillance, and containment, which perpetuate historic structures of heteropatriarchal, colonial, racist, white supremacist, and capitalist oppression” - Jasmina Tacheva & Sriv…
Last night, @TheJusticeDept joined xAI in seeking a dismissal over a frivolous lawsuit over temporary turbines powering the data center. “Grok's continued operation and availability is a matter of paramount national security,” and is suitable “mission-critical operations across […
An interesting twist not mentioned here is that Anthropic's actually the one making good use of this datacenter that the government is defending, not xAI https://x.com/...
The NAACP of Mississippi is trying to shut down xAI's data center that powers Grok under the guise of a Clean Air Act enforcement action. But the Executive Branch—not the NAACP—is responsible for enforcing federal law. The NAACP's lawsuit threatens American national, energy,
Very grateful to @DAGToddBlanche @ASGWoodward A/AAG Gustafson and the @DOJEnvironment team for seeking dismissal of this meritless suit against xAI over our temporary turbines in Northern Mississippi. 1/
Ut oh. @asgwoodward says the Executive Branch can tell brown Mississippians that Elon Musk can poison them even while the Executive Branch ignores ONLY Elon Musk's election cheating. Weird how DOJ seems to work for Elon, not real Americans. Also what is “American national
NEW: the US government intervened Monday on behalf of xai in a lawsuit over its gas turbines, claiming that the company needs to run the turbines in order to power Grok, which is “vital” for national security lots of wild stuff in the filing, more here https://www.wired.com/...
i'm old enough to remember when folks in Memphis managed to take their own arial photos of Colossus to show that xAI had 35 methane gas turbines operating on-site, not just the 15 that were permitted. — now court documents put that figure at FIFTY SEVEN. — www.wired.com/story…