As a child, Abre’ Conner carried books, pocket video games, and an albuterol inhaler in her backpack to and from school and on play dates with friends.
Growing up in Polk County, Fla., some 40 miles east of Tampa, Conner often passed by a cluster of smokestacks that surrounded her neighborhood. She later discovered they were phosphate plants manufacturing fertilizer and contributing heavily, she believed, to her debilitating asthma attacks.
Motivated by her childhood health issues, Conner grew up with a personal interest in environmental issues and became an attorney in that area of the law. Now, the 38-year-old works at the NAACP and serves as the group’s director of environmental and climate justice. She has used her background in environmental justice to aid the nation’s oldest civil rights organization in its fight to help communities of color battle polluting industry.
“That’s kind of what led me there was my own personal experience, seeing the inequities in that intersection of civil rights issues and environmental laws that I thought were supposed to protect everyone, but I knew were not,” she said.
The NAACP last month sued billionaire Elon Musk’s xAI Corp. and its subsidiary MZX Tech LLC for installing gas-powered turbines in Mississippi to power its Colossus II data center in Tennessee without obtaining the required air permits. The move, the lawsuit alleges, puts predominantly Black communities on both sides of the states’ border at risk.
The dispute reflects the wave of pushback over the impact—health, environmental, and economic—of data centers as they proliferate to power the artificial intelligence era.
“What we’re seeing with these AI data centers is for many of them, they’re trying to get it up and running, no matter the cost, as quickly as possible,” Conner said.
Taking on xAI
The NAACP teamed up with two of the nation’s largest nonprofit environmental law organizations, Earthjustice and the Southern Environmental Law Center, alleging xAI violated the federal Clean Air Act.
Earthjustice has previously worked with the NAACP on similar issues such as emission regulations of highly toxic air pollutants and lead in drinking water. The environmental group has received funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, the charitable organization founded by Michael Bloomberg. Bloomberg Law is operated by entities controlled by Michael Bloomberg.
In an interview, NAACP President and CEO Derrick Johnson described environmental justice, as “important as any other civil rights issue.” The lawsuit, he said, is an effort to “shed light” on the impact data centers were having on communities across the nation.
Cornell William Brooks, a former NAACP president and current social justice professor at the Harvard Kennedy School, said data centers were another example of industries “externalizing the cost of doing business,” akin to a company dumping pollution into a river and undermining benefits for the nearby community.
“We’re in the midst of this technological revolution, which is taking place at an unprecedented scale and scope and speed without a clear plan, vision, strategy for protection for American consumers. And most particularly Black and Brown people,” Brooks said.
The groups are seeking about $124,400 in penalties per day for violations and moved for a preliminary injunction.
Musk’s Colossus II data center supports the AI chatbot Grok and operates in Memphis. However, the gas turbines—owned and operated by MZX Tech—sit about 1.6 miles across the border in Southaven, Miss., where approximately 39% of the population is Black, according to the 2024 US Census Bureau. A third Colossus data center is also planned for the Southaven area, according to the lawsuit.
The NAACP claimed in its lawsuit that xAI and its subsidiary initially began operating 27 gas turbines “without an air permit or regard for the health and safety of people living nearby.”
“The Colossus Gas Plant emits significant amounts of harmful pollutants, including nitrogen oxides (“NOx”) and formaldehyde, which are tied to increases in asthma, respiratory diseases, heart problems, and certain cancers,” according to the complaint. “These emissions do not stop at the Mississippi state line; Tennessee residents are also exposed.”
“Not only were they going to build this level of pollution in a community that’s already faced so much environmental degradation, but they also were like, ‘we’re just going to skip over the law altogether,’” Conner said.
The Southern Environmental Law Center commissioned a Feb. 13 report by EmPower Analytics Group that determined health risks for communities in Tennessee and Mississippi would increase from exposure to the proposed permanent gas turbines for Colossus II.
xAI didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment.
The company’s methods, Conner said, echo how other industries set up in areas already affected by pollution, as well as how xAI built Colossus I. One major similarity between the two Colossus projects in Memphis and Southaven is the use of gas turbines before acquiring a permit from state agencies.
The Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality, for example, agreed with xAI’s argument that the turbines for Colossus II were exempt from certain regulations because they were mobile and temporary sources, according to the lawsuit. The agency eventually issued a permit, which the NAACP and environmental groups opposed.
“There’s no question in my mind that it’s a bad faith effort, because they did this once, and eventually had to go get permits, and now they did it again,” said Jennifer Danis, federal energy director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at the New York University School of Law.
Economic Investment
Despite the lawsuit’s allegations, many elected officials see data centers as driving job creation, technological upgrades, and innovation in their states.
In his 2026 State of the State address in February, Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) said his plan was to have the state “both power America and be the catalyst for solving our nation’s most complex problems. So, we’re moving ahead on another front—AI and quantum computing.”
Lee pointed to Oracle’s presence in Nashville and xAI in Memphis as part of “the best business environment in the country.”
In June 2025, Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves (R) announced an accelerator program to foster AI development across the state’s higher learning institutions.
“This investment will help to ensure that Mississippians are equipped with the skills needed to thrive in a rapidly evolving digital economy,” he said in the 2025 statement. Reeves’s office didn’t respond to Bloomberg Law questions regarding the lawsuit.
Another AI company, Apolo AI Launchpad, delivers AI for manufacturing, construction and data center industries. Bill Kleyman, Apolo’s CEO, said not all data centers operate like xAI.
“The challenge that we’re experiencing is that so much of what we’re doing is being lumped into an umbrella,” he said in an interview. “There’s different types of operators out there.”
Apolo, Kleyman said, uses a mix of energy resources including fossil fuels as well as renewable sources such as battery storage, hydropower, solar, and wind. Data center benefits can include “job creation, there’s tax-base expansion—infrastructure upgrades to local communities,” he said.
“The key differences between a good data center neighbor and a bad one: transparency,” he said.
Good data centers “explain what’s being built, how much water is being used, how much energy is being used, what the phases are, what the community gets in return.”
“A bad one,” he said, ”just basically avoids all the specifics, hides behind an NDA, and just basically tells residents ‘trust me, it’s fine.’”
Nationwide Considerations
President Donald Trump has encouraged investments in artificial intelligence and fossil fuels while his administration has also undermined environmental justice efforts. Earlier this month, the federal government issued a notice indicating it might intervene in the case in support of xAI, citing Trump’s executive order to remove barriers to American leadership in the AI industry.
“The president has encouraged tech companies to supply their own power off the grid,” said Laura Thoms, the director of enforcement at Earthjustice who has been consulting on the xAI case. “If they are going to do that, they need to follow the law, and that includes basic standards of transparency, pollution controls, public involvement, public health.”
Courts will have to determine how to apply the Clean Air Act to data center lawsuits. For example, one of the core issues with Colossus II is how the law defines and regulates mobile sources versus stationary sources.
If a source is considered mobile, then it isn’t required to go through the same stringent permitting process of a stationary source, Thoms said.
The turbines for Colossus II were “brought in on wheels, but then have stayed in one place,” she said. They have been “operating and polluting in that one location for many months, so just the mere fact of slapping wheels on something does not make it a mobile source.”
It’s these types of legal intricacies that the NAACP is hoping to untangle.
“We do think that is important that xAI does not potentially copy and paste or even similarly, try to move forward with finding what they believe are going to be loopholes and what we believe is very clear within the law,” Conner said.
New Industry, Same Mission
The NAACP’s data center work, Conner says, isan extension of the organization’s legacy.
“We’re holding these polluters accountable in a way that really fits within kind of a civil rights framework,” she said.
Conner honed her skills as an environmental attorney at the US Department of Education Office for Civil Rights and the Center on Race, Poverty, and the Environment before the NAACP hired her in 2022. She helped the organization put together resources on how to negotiate community benefits as well as devise a list of values to guide communities when entering into conversations with local government on data center concerns.
“We were seeing a lot of the same plays from other industries of the past, but just covered up with this promise of a technological and innovative future that definitely needs some reworking,” she said.
In 2016, the NAACP addressed water contamination in Flint, Mich., by filing a class action suit on behalf of residents.
“We thought that this form of environmental racism was not peripheral, but central to the NAACP’s mission,“ Brooks said. “The NAACP has stood on the side of people who demanded the right to not be discriminated against with respect to the imposition of environmental damage to their homes, their neighborhoods, their bodies.”
Johnson characterized Conner as a “catalyst” in the NAACP’s efforts and said her legal training, environmental policy background, and ability to work with communities, were a “trifecta” in their fight for environmental justice.
Conner said she plans to ensure the NAACP holds “corporations accountable and ensure communities are able to live in places that they’re proud of.”
“I would love for us to be at a place where we don’t have gaps in investments into communities who have borne the brunt of environment and climate injustices for a number of years,” she said, “and that we’re at a place where the protections that currently exist are built in a way that envisions a future for everybody.”
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