Elon Musk’s AI company is offering to buy homes in Southaven, Mississippi, on one condition: the owners must give up their claims in a lawsuit over the noise from its power plant. Eighteen households have already agreed, according to reporting by NewsOne, which cited the Guardian’s earlier account.
The company, xAI (rebranded this year as SpaceXAI), has identified 418 homes it wants to buy, NewsOne reported. The average house in Southaven sells for about $180,000. The offers come through Burch Realty Group on behalf of MZX Tech LLC, an xAI subsidiary, and residents say they are priced from Zillow estimates. The letter does not state a purchase price.
What it does state is the catch. MZX “is offering to purchase real estate in Southaven in exchange for, among other things, a release of all claims related to the lawsuit,” the letter says, as the Mississippi Free Press reported. It adds: “After executing the Release Agreement, you will be unable to recover any damages or other relief from the … lawsuit, and you will also be unable to bring claims on your own behalf.”
The class action was filed in June by three residents, Jason Haley, Preston Herrington and Taylor Logsdon, on behalf of more than 10,000 people. It describes “high-pitched squealing, continuous engine roaring, low-frequency rumbling, and tonal humming or whining” from the plant’s gas turbines, and seeks compensation for physical and emotional harm and for lost property values. xAI has run as many as 69 temporary turbines at the site to power its Grok supercomputer.
“There’s a high-pitched hum and then another sound like an airplane over your house,” Haley said. “It’s been so torturous I can’t sleep.” Neighbor Elizabeth Rose, who is not a plaintiff, said the noise is “continuous” and that she has been woken at 2 a.m.
Under the deal, every sale takes a household out of the case, and the people who stay are left with a house next to the plant.
The Black stake
The buyout lands in a fight that is also about who lives near the turbines. In April, the NAACP, with the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, sued xAI under the Clean Air Act. The suit says the Southaven turbines run without the required federal air permits and could emit 1,700 tons of nitrogen oxides, 180 tons of fine particulate matter, 500 tons of carbon monoxide and 19 tons of formaldehyde a year. It describes the surrounding communities as majority-Black and points to xAI’s first data center in Memphis, beside the historically Black neighborhood of Boxtown.
“xAI is following a shameful, familiar pattern: asking Black and frontline communities to bear the toxic brunt of ‘innovation,'” said Abre’ Conner, the NAACP’s environmental director. Mississippi regulators have approved permits for 41 turbines. xAI has maintained the units are temporary and do not need permits.
The lawsuits are still pending. Neither the buyout letter nor the reporting says how long residents have to sign.
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