US Department of Justice claims NAACP lawsuit threatens ‘national, economic, and energy security’.The United States government has intervened on the side of Elon Musk’s xAI in an environmental dispute over a $20bn data centre in Tennessee, claiming that efforts to block a related power project threaten national security.In a court motion filed this week, the Department of Justice requested the dismissal of a lawsuit accusing the AI company of illegally operating dozens of natural gas turbines constructed to power the Colossus 2 data centre in Memphis, Tennessee.Recommended Stories list of 4 itemsend of listThe National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the largest civil rights group for African Americans, filed the lawsuit in April under the 1963 Clean Air Act, which allows citizens to seek injunctions and civil penalties against alleged polluters.The NAACP alleges that xAI built the turbines, located in nearby Southaven, Mississippi, without obtaining the necessary permits, exposing hundreds of thousands of residents to harmful pollutants linked to “increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, heart problems, and certain cancers”.The lawsuit notes that a “much larger share” of residents are Black compared with the US general population.In its motion, filed in a US District Court on Monday, the Justice Department accused the NAACP of threatening “national, economic, and energy security by seeking to shut off the power supply for artificial intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations”.The motion also claims that the US Constitu …
