SOUTHAVEN – Jason Haley, who’s lived in his Southaven home for the last two decades, in August started to hear a whirring, mechanical noise from outside that sounded like a leaf blower.

The noise would go on for days at a time and through the night, he told Mississippi Today. He soon realized the sounds were coming from a cluster of natural gas turbines about a half mile away.

Over the summer, billionaire Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company set up shop in north Mississippi, erecting dozens of turbines on the site of a former power plant to fuel two data centers just up the road in Memphis.

In 2024, the company, xAI, finished construction on the first center, Colossus, which it claims houses the “world’s biggest supercomputer.” Colossus holds over 200,000 computer chips powering

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