Wholestory

SpaceX confirmed it is building a foundry in Bastrop, Texas to cast the single-crystal nickel-superalloy blades and vanes at the heart of an industrial gas turbine, with the output kept in-house for Raptor rocket turbopumps and for the turbines powering xAI’s data centers. Elon Musk called it a game-changer that could bring turbines online 18 months sooner; analysts say a new casting plant takes four years to reach production, its vacuum furnaces two years to procure, and can scrap more than half its castings for years. Howmet Aerospace, which makes roughly half the world’s turbine components, fell 7 percent.

SpaceXAI shut down 11 of the 69 temporary, mobile gas turbines running its Colossus 2 data center at Southaven, Mississippi — the first to go dark under the 30 July agreed order with state regulators, which gives every turbine its own retirement date, bars any new one after 15 July, and requires shutdowns to be reported to the department every two weeks. Physical removal begins as early as September and must finish by July 2027. What replaces them is not a grid connection but a permitted 1.2-gigawatt plant of 41 permanent turbines on the same site.

The guidance is a memorandum signed on 16 July by the EPA’s air chief Aaron Szabo and sent to all ten regional administrators; the agency announced it on 27 July. It reads the Acid Rain Program — whose continuous emissions monitoring is one of the few reliable windows into what a plant releases — as reaching only generators that sell electricity or must report to the Department of Energy, and finds a plant wired to no grid does neither. The exemption is conditional: connect later and the programme may apply after all. The memo decides nothing for any particular facility.

The gas-turbine crunch pulled a new supplier into the US market: Italy's Ansaldo Energia, absent more than three decades, will sell eight mid-sized AE64.3A machines — about 624 megawatts — to Pacifico Energy for a Texas data-center project, first deliveries in 2027. It enters a market the incumbents cannot keep up with: GE Vernova reports 116 gigawatts under contract and is mostly sold out through 2030, Siemens Energy holds 95, and across the four largest makers firm orders top 157 gigawatts, near 247 including reserved slots. That scarcity is the whole reason behind-the-meter developers buy whatever generates power.

Global Energy Monitor's late-August tracker update found the twelve largest gas power projects planned in Texas are all dedicated to powering data centers behind the meter, and the permit filings put their emissions ceilings in the millions of tons a year. Fermi America's Project Matador plans 90 combined-cycle turbines authorized for 24 million tons of CO2; the 6-gigawatt Nexus Hubbard, 22 million; engine farms of 240 and 640 units, 10 and 8 million. Nationwide, GEM finds engines and simple-cycle turbines — the quick, cheap, dirty kind — make up nearly half the technology. These are permit ceilings, not measured output, and announced, not built.

The EPA has proposed removing the federal requirement that states publicise applications for "minor source" air permits and run a 30-day comment period — the category that covers landfills, laundromats, steel mills and data centres. Attorneys general from 14 states and three cities have written opposing it: "despite the name, even 'minor' sources can pose significant health and environmental impacts", and removing publication and comment "sidelines these fundamental transparency and democratic safeguards… particularly for accelerating the buildout of data centers and other artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure". States could still set stricter standards; they could also drop the comment period, because nothing federal would require it. It is a proposal — comment is still required today, and the change would take effect within a year.

The NAACP and its Mississippi state conference, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, sued xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech under the Clean Air Act for running 27 gas turbines at Southaven, Mississippi without an air permit to power the Colossus 2 data centre. The suit follows a 60-day notice of intent sent in February, after which the turbines kept running. Counsel puts the plant’s potential to emit at more than 1,700 tons of nitrogen oxides a year — which would make it the largest industrial NOx source in a greater Memphis area already failing national smog standards — plus up to 180 tons of fine particulates and 19 of formaldehyde. Those are potential-to-emit figures asserted by the plaintiffs’ lawyers, not measurements. A separate 41-turbine plant is being permitted at the same site.

A federal preliminary-injunction hearing set for 24 August in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi could force SpaceXAI — the company xAI became after merging into Elon Musk's rocket firm — to switch off the gas plant powering its Colossus 2 data center in Southaven, near Memphis. The NAACP and its Mississippi State Conference, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center, are suing under the Clean Air Act over turbines the company runs without air permits; discovery revealed roughly 30 more than first alleged, putting about 57 to 60 in operation and 69 on site, only 14 fitted with the pollution controls a permit would require. SpaceXAI told the court that losing the power would make Grok "largely cease to function"; the Department of Justice moved to intervene on 15 June, calling Grok vital to national security. The hearing would have overtaken a 30 July agreed order binding the company to rebuild the plant as a permitted 1.2-gigawatt facility by July 2027. It did not happen: a notice filed on 21 August postponed it, with no new date given. The turbines keep running in the meantime — 57 active of 69 on site as of July — and the plant is expected to power two further SpaceXAI data centres now under construction, Macrohardrr in Southaven and "minihard" in Memphis.

A survey of air-permit applications across five of the largest data-center power projects in the country found that every one of them relies on simple-cycle gas turbines — the least efficient way to burn gas for electricity. A simple-cycle turbine mixes fuel and air in a combustion chamber and vents the waste heat. The combined-cycle units generally used at power plants that serve the grid add a steam turbine to capture that heat and turn it into more electricity, and so release fewer emissions for the same amount of energy. Reporting by WIRED found the pattern across Amazon's Pecos County plant, which "will rely solely on simple cycle turbines"; at least three Ohio plants being developed by the oil and gas company Williams for Meta; a plant Crusoe is building on its Stargate campus in Abilene, Texas, to power a Microsoft data center, with 39 simple-cycle turbines; Google's Goodnight data center in Texas, whose permit application describes 20 more; and xAI's two Colossus data centers in Memphis, run by dozens of them. All are permitted to release millions of tons of greenhouse gases. The reason is not a regulatory loophole — no exemption is at work, and both Williams and Crusoe say their plants comply with local and national rules and carry emissions-control equipment. It is speed. Installing a handful of simple-cycle turbines is quicker and cheaper than waiting for the extra equipment a combined-cycle plant needs, against a yearslong backlog for turbine orders and parts. "Right now, because of the way the supply chain is for turbines, they're having to go with what they can get their hands on," said Britt Burt of the energy market intelligence firm Industrial Info Resources, who had not expected developers to lean on simple-cycle units this heavily. The load shape helps too: AI training draws enormous spikes on demand, and simple-cycle machines start and stop faster. "If you have a highly fluctuating load, it's better to have 30 things that can individually turn on and off than to have one giant thing that doesn't like to be turned on and off," said Stephen Lynch, who directs Penn State's Center for Gas Turbine Research. The spikes are severe enough that operators have reported turbines breaking under the stress of repeated starts. One trade-off runs the other way: simple-cycle turbines generally need no water, where Burt estimates a 250-megawatt combined-cycle plant could draw about 75,000 gallons an hour — and Amazon's permit application lists that absence of water use as an "environmental benefit." These machines are being built to last decades.

Amazon confirmed it is behind GW Ranch, an AI data-center campus in Pecos County, Texas built to run entirely off the electricity grid on a dedicated on-site gas plant — its first major off-grid data center, and among the largest natural-gas power projects ever proposed in the United States. The significance is architectural: on a campus that draws nothing from the grid, the document that sets the ceiling on how much computing can be built is not an interconnection agreement but an air permit. Texas issued that permit — PSDTX1672, to the developer Pacifico GW — in January 2026. It authorizes 35 turbines for up to 7.65 gigawatts of nameplate capacity, about 5 gigawatts of nominal delivered output, and up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, more than any existing US power plant emits; at that ceiling it would be the single largest source of greenhouse-gas pollution in the country. Operators rarely emit as much as their permits allow, but a fraction of that ceiling is still very large. On stage, the project is permitted and under construction, not energized: Amazon confirmed ownership after filing three building permits with the state in early August, and satellite imagery showed land clearing had begun by 24 July. The company framed the off-grid design as protective of other electricity customers, saying the campus is "powered by new on-site generation that won't raise electricity costs for Texas families," that Amazon "believes in paying the full costs of powering our operations," and that the site will draw non-potable brackish groundwater rather than drinking or irrigation water. One clause is worth holding onto: the plant is designed to transition to grid-connected service as interconnection allows, which would eventually make this private generator a participant in the market it was built to avoid. The project sits against Amazon's 2019 Climate Pledge to reach net zero by 2040, a target its rising emissions have already pushed further away.

xAI — operating as SpaceXAI since its merger with Elon Musk's rocket company — agreed with the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality to a fixed timetable for removing all 69 temporary, mobile gas turbines that power its Colossus 2 data center from Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line from Memphis. Removal begins as early as August 2026 and must finish by July 2027. What replaces them is not a grid connection: it is a permanent 1.2-gigawatt plant of 41 turbines on the same site, authorized under a Clean Air Act permit the company says was granted in March 2026 after seven months of review, and it is the Mississippi Environmental Quality Permit Board's approval of those 41 turbines that the removal plan depends on. This is the first time an operator that built its own generation without permits has been required to replace it with permitted generation on a regulator's timetable — a conversion, not a retreat. The electrons still come from the same place; what changes is the paperwork and the permanence. The temporary turbines are the subject of a Clean Air Act lawsuit brought in February 2026 by the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice for the NAACP and its Mississippi State Conference, alleging they were installed and run without required permits or pollution controls in a county already graded "F" for ozone by the American Lung Association; the U.S. Department of Justice has moved to intervene on the company's side, arguing the litigation threatens national, economic and energy security. xAI frames the order as codifying a good-neighbor commitment and points to selective-catalytic-reduction retrofits, sound walls and silencers. The SELC calls it "a stark reversal" of the company's earlier one-year pledge, negotiated in secret and leaving "dangerous, illegal, and unregulated pollution" running until at least July 2027. Two days earlier Representative Frank Pallone had written to Musk noting the company applied for only 15 turbine permits while operating roughly 60, and citing research putting Colossus 2's turbines at roughly 5,000 tons of nitrogen oxide, 7,000 tons of carbon monoxide, 200 tons of sulfur dioxide and over 40 tons of formaldehyde a year. A SELC-commissioned study estimates $30–44 million in annual regional health damages from the permanent plant. The removal is a commitment, not a completed act, and the agreed order binds the company to Mississippi regulators while much of the affected population lives across the line in Tennessee.

GE Vernova told investors its gas turbine order backlog had reached 116 gigawatts at the end of the second quarter, up from 100 gigawatts three months earlier, and that it expects a combined backlog of orders and slot reservations of 125 gigawatts by the end of the year. The company shipped 3 gigawatts of turbines in the quarter and signed 20 gigawatts of orders and reservations. Chief executive Scott Strazik said the customer base now spans about 100 entities in 26 countries, roughly 80 percent traditional buyers such as utilities and 20 percent data centers. Like its main rivals Siemens and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, GE Vernova is booking reservations four to five years out: it is selling 2031 delivery slots now and expects to be more than half contracted for that year by December, while declining to say when 2032 bookings will firm up. That wait is the whole reason on-site generation exists — it is roughly the same delay a developer faces joining an interconnection queue. Strazik spoke repeatedly of "strong" pricing without giving figures; in a note the same day, BNP Paribas analyst Moses Sutton estimated about $790 per kilowatt for heavy-duty turbines, $950 for HA-class combined-cycle machines and $1,800 for aeroderivative units — the aircraft- and warship-derived turbines that behind-the-meter developers, unable to secure heavy-duty machines, have been buying. On the company's plan to lift annual manufacturing capacity from 20 to 30 gigawatts by 2030, Sutton said the jury was out.

Georgia's Environmental Protection Division ordered construction halted on the first "pop-up" power plant built to serve a data center in the state, and cited both companies behind it for breaking state law by installing generators without a permit. The plant is going up in Covington, about 40 miles east of downtown Atlanta, built by the Houston firm VoltaGrid; rather than plugging into the grid, it is designed to generate electricity for a data center under construction next door by the developer Serverfarm. The division sent notices of violation to both companies in the first week of July, a day after The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported that they had begun building dozens of gas engines before obtaining the air permits Georgia and the federal Clean Air Act require. The order is a reminder that the constraint on building your own power plant is not only the turbine supply chain but the permit, and that the permit can arrive after the concrete does — or not at all.

The Environmental Protection Agency proposed a rule that would eliminate the minimum federal requirement for public notice and comment on "minor-source" air permits — the permit class that covers the gas engines and diesel generators installed at data centers. Under the proposal, filed as docket EPA-HQ-OAR-2025-1212, state and local air agencies would decide for themselves "whether, when, and for how long" to allow the public to comment. The agency says the change aligns its regulations with the best reading of the Clean Air Act, which does not statutorily require notice and comment for minor sources, and insists the proposal "does not alter emission standards or weaken environmental protections." "The state and local authorities closest to the issues and the public should be making the decisions on the permitting process as much as possible, not Washington," said Administrator Lee Zeldin. The permit class has become a data-center story by volume: a Columbus Ledger-Enquirer review of Georgia records found 20 minor-source permits for data-center diesel generators approved since January 2025, against 17 in the whole decade from 2014 to 2024. Southern Environmental Law Center attorney Keri Powell, who says such reviews are what let outside groups scrutinize pollution estimates, framed the stakes as whether permits "can be issued in secret, or if they have to go out for public notice and comment" — the same reviews that surfaced the Newton County plant Georgia later ordered to halt. Nothing is settled: the rule is a proposal, the comment period closes on 21 August, and a state that wants to keep its existing requirements may.

ERCOT set out the terms of the pathway that lets a data center build generation alongside its own load — the Withdrawal-Limited Private Use Network, known in the market as "bring your own generation" — and the terms undercut the idea that on-site power is a way around the grid. A private-use network lets co-located generation and load operate behind an enforceable limit on how much the campus may draw from the grid, netting what it generates against what it consumes, with gas turbines and solar both named as eligible on-site resources. But in a market notice dated 26 June, ERCOT required that every new generator intending to co-locate with a large load this way file a complete Full Interconnection Study application, accepted through its resource-integration system, on or before 10 July. Because ERCOT allows itself ten business days to check an application for completeness, the practical deadline was the day the notice went out. Behind-the-meter generators, in other words, remain subject to the same generation-interconnection requirements as anyone else. The question then became who is really bringing their own power. Governor Greg Abbott's 3 August directive ordering an audit of every data center moving through the interconnection process requires each one to disclose "any effort and progress to construct or procure on-site electric generation including generation type" — turning a claim developers had been making in press releases into something a regulator checks. ERCOT withheld the project classifications it had been due to issue on 7 August and said it would ask the Public Utility Commission for a good-cause exception to its own planning timelines.