DOJ claims xAI's gas turbines are a matter of 'national and energy security'

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/16/doj-claims-xais-unpermitted-gas-turbines-are-a-matter-of-national-economic-and-energy-security/

by dlgeek • 1 month ago

90 83 1 month ago

techcrunch.com

Terr_2• 1 month ago

Ugh, what violation of local law can't be excused by specious "national security" claims?

resulting in a corresponding increase in three major air pollutants:

Sometimes I wonder how valuable it would be to go to vulnerable areas (ecologically or socio-economically) and record baseline pollution, noise, etc. readings, simply to give future residents some statistical ammunition against some New Thing ruins the old implicit standard of safety and comfort.

I guess the problem is you don't always know what to measure until it's nearly too late, such as if the problem is a new chemical that needs a particular test to measure, or noise that isn't about raw decibels but causes problems with particular frequencies and harmonics, etc.

x______________• 1 month ago

The company, which is now a division of SpaceX, is likely to buy more generators in the coming months or years. In SpaceX’s IPO filing, the company said that it will buy another $2.8 billion worth of gas turbines to power its AI data centers over the next three years. Of that, at least $2 billion are earmarked for “mobile gas turbines.”

SpaceX, the new Tesla... who saw that coming? :(

boothby• 1 month ago

Timnit Gebru was laughed out of town for overlooking research into making LLMs more energy efficient. By the logic used to drag her through the mud, Musk must be a total idiot to be buying so much fossil fuel capacity. Truly, nobody could see this coming. Must be 5d chess.

trhway2• 1 month ago

I'd not be surprised if SpaceX/Elon will start manufacturing those turbines. They do have necessary engineering and manufacturing chops.

JumpCrisscross• 1 month ago

what violation of local law can't be excused by specious "national security" claims?

None. If this continues, the economy pivots to profits to the President.

YeahThisIsMe• 1 month ago

Lmao, you're a little late there.

mikestaas• 1 month ago

In case you haven't seen it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bP80DEAbuo

someguydave• 1 month ago

Debunked https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/contra-benn-jorda...

thisisit2• 1 month ago

It is no longer about making good faith claims in court. It is all about RW media dog and pony show. They can make provably false claims in the RW media with - "Do you want China to overtake US in this race?" and still garner support. And even if they lose they can paint the judge as leftist etc. so they have stopped bothering with even trying.

ffsm8• 1 month ago

Your focus on "RW" is misguided. The "LW" constantly lie and gaslight too.

You probably just don't take offense there because it more closely aligns with your personal world view - or you dismiss it as the ramblings of a madman, without realizing that you aren't doing the same for "RW".

It's a sad reality we live in. And it's the same in my country (not American), albeit not as extreme as it is in the US right now.

matwood• 1 month ago

Buying access to POTUS pays off. Who knew?!

georgemcbay• 1 month ago

The surprising part of buying off politicians is how absolutely cheap it is relative to the benefits received.

Gigachad• 1 month ago

Because they are all winning. And you are paying for it.

sbseitz• 1 month ago

Sure does pay to rig elections for Trump!

fy20• 1 month ago

Is the plan to use the gas turbines temporarily until the grid connection is upgraded?

stefan_• 1 month ago

Its obviously a permanent fixture. And well, electricity by virtue of having been around for 100+ years as a mass market product has been utterly ossified, saddled with far too onerous regulations and taxes and is being driven by inflexible, uninterested practitioners.

Of course someone will go „its just energy“ and use almost free natural gas. In some places in the US a diesel generator with gas from the pump is likely cheaper too.

iknowstuff• 1 month ago

Think this applies to Texas ercot? Seems to be doing well, but not sure if its energy market is more free than in other states

Forgeties79• 1 month ago

“Temporarily”

ExoticPearTree• 1 month ago

It IT there is nothing more permanent than a temporary fix.

That being said, why don’t utilities provide power when it is needed and make peopke wait for months or years on end? I don’t think it is cheaper to run on generators for months/years.

cryptonym• 1 month ago

They don't care much about connecting it to the grid. They'll take whatever is available and cheaper. If gas turbine on trucks are somehow cheaper (reduced regulation, taxation, planning...) than grid, that'll stay as-is in the foreseeable future. Once you spent billions on turbines and gas contracts, you most likely won't connect to the grid overnight.

nujabe• 1 month ago

And Paul Graham wants us to believe you don’t become a billionaire by cheating.

AbramsAi• 1 month ago

how is it cheating?

seattle_spring• 1 month ago

You're asking how breaking the law is cheating? If not, can you clarify your question?

bflesch• 1 month ago

These self-made stories are total bs, most of them are nepo kids and their family's aristocratic, colonial-era wealth is repatriated to the US through startup investments.

Epstein files highlight that once you achieve intergenerational wealth there is a natural tendency to make your children legally immune so that your wealth can't be stolen. It's not only about achieving a diplomatic passport from some small nation as honorary consul in order to avoid a parking fee, but about placing your offspring in positions at five eyes intelligence agencies which makes them legally immune and gives them access to fake identities.

During cold war there was a national security need for extra-congressional operations in foreign countries and off-the-record budgets, which had to be managed by "someone" on a need-to-know basis.

My research indicates that many of the billionaires we see today are five eyes nepo kids. Their grandparents did great things for the country during WW2/cold war, many of them were researchers in national security context (Maxwell in electronics, Epstein in electronics/medicine/psychiatry, (van) Trump in radiology/agriculture/pathogens).

My theory is that their work for five-eyes intelligence ties together the now-famous family names such as Maxwell, Epstein, (van) Trump, Thiel, Jarecki, Sweeney, Ellison, Lawrence, Graham, Fox, King, Richardson, and many others, as they pop up together in primary sources in the national security context since at least WW2.

There is a reason why middle names such as "Baron" or "Earl" or "Don" (Spanish for lord) keep showing up. Many come from old-money aristocracy with the ability to change IDs at will.

For example Donald Trump is on the record to have (ab)used fake identities throughout his career, and some primary sources indicate that he used further identities that have not been publicly reported on such as "Donald Epstein" - a name that pops up together with Kashoggi. Also Maxwell and Epstein are documented in the files to have used fake identities.

So the whole thought process about "morals" or "stealing" is wasted time, the King and his Lords and Knights can do whatever they want and nobody can stop them.

The only thing that has changed is that for 50 years we all believed into the "American Dream" and the rags-to-riches fake stories, when in fact the aristocracy never left, kept their wealth offshore, and can make their kids pop up at will at the top of any industry of their choice.

gregjw• 1 month ago

what are we doing here folks

nomel• 1 month ago

Letting power monopolies, backed by corrupt political investors, sit idle for decades, as their profits, and corruption lawsuits, soar.

senectus1• 1 month ago

setting up an interesting baseline for what the next administration is going to get away with.

arjie• 1 month ago

The national security and defense arguments are fortunately the only things that protect any forward progress. Without DoD cover, every Starlink launch would be governed by the California Coastal Commission and friends. Frankly, living in the Bay Area, where people use anti-pollution laws to prevent student housing, I think I understand a little the law structure of the United States. It is perhaps analogous to the way Jewish people treat the halakha. The idea being that if you can find a way around the law, it is meant to be operated that way. So students are noise pollution, bike lanes need environmental impact reports while highways don't, solar power is polluting while gas isn't, endangered species genetically identical to common species are discovered when they would block dams, and 50 years of having a Nuclear Regulatory Commission means exactly one reactor approved by them built.

So there's outrage and all that, but this is the fundamental law of the USA: the law is the Word; and all bugs in it are features.

For the most part, I get why this helps the USA. But boy does it feel like there's going to be a reckoning one day.

bxk762• 1 month ago

Also the law is not static. Things can go back and forth. Out of phase with whatever trends in news cycles. Watch the Germans debating Nuclear phase out over 30 years.

leonidasrup• 1 month ago

The problem with large scale industry investments like nuclear power plants is that they don't follow easily whatever trends in news cycles. It takes years to build a nuclear power plant, but it takes just a single vote in the parliament to stop it. Or a referendum like in Austria.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zwentendorf_Nuclear_Power_Plan...

So even through some German politicians are currently discussing nuclear phase-in, no investor will invest in nuclear power in Germany, because no investor could be sure that the next or over-next government with participation of German Greens would not again vote for nuclear phase-out.

As much I like some political ideas of German Greens, I understand that for the older generation of Greens, nuclear power is the prime evil which has to banished from face of the Earth and the reason for existence of the German Green party.

holistio• 1 month ago

It's a matter of time before people start rioting against these national and energy security matters also known as data centres.

jmyeet• 1 month ago

And watch them get charged with terrorism. Anti-nuke protestors who did no real harm were charged under 18 USC 1361 and faced up to 25 years in prison [1]. “Sabotage” here means over $1.000 in damage.

[1] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2019/11/20/...

stymaar5• 1 month ago

Good luck catching people using FPV drones to commit these “sabotages” though.

trhway2• 1 month ago

"Grok is one of four AI models that support “mission-critical operations,” such as its recent strikes in Iran."

That probably one of the reasons of such a glorious success there.

stymaar5• 1 month ago

“Iranian schoolgirls are world famous for their feminist protests, hence this girl school is a high priority target to protect the world from wokeness”

chinathrow• 1 month ago

Corruption.

ElenaDaibunny• 1 month ago

the most creative regulatory arbitrage I've seen this year,haha

b800h• 1 month ago

Sorry, Brit here, I'm confused. Why is the plaintiff here the NAACP?

nerdsniper2• 1 month ago

We are confused here too. Really could be any large enough group I suppose as long as it contains a lot of members living near the turbines.

I suspect because these data centers are usually placed in areas where land and labor are very cheap, which in some/many states are predominantly black(er) areas.

Really though, the USA has been chipping away at the ability for groups like these to show “standing” so its mildly impressive that this case got this far.

MallocVoidstar2• 1 month ago

Memphis is majority black

toomim• 1 month ago

Because tribalism. NAACP is lefty, and Musk is righty. So they fight.

watwut• 1 month ago

You need to have a "standing" to be even allowed to fight in court. The question was completely valid legal question - why they have the legal standing.

Terr_2• 1 month ago

IANAL, but:

1. It seems the plaintiff is the Southern Environmental Law Center, which makes a lot more sense when the issue is violations of environmental law. The NAACP is supporting, and I can imagine that there are some consistent overlaps between what the two groups are concerned with, given that where people pollute in the south correlates to where certain ethnicities can afford (or were allowed) to buy property and live.

2. Certain laws (in this case probably the Clean Air Act) creates a category of "citizen suits", or "private right of action". While that doesn't totally eliminate "I am harmed" standing, it does means you don't need to "the one whose laws were harmed." In other words, it means you can sue for a violation of federal law instead of being stuck waiting for the federal Department of Justice to care.

sometimelurker• 1 month ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism, probably. I think the Flint Michigan water crisis falls into this category but feel free to correct me

westurner3• 1 month ago

Does AGR tech work on methane turbine generators?

Shouldn't all methane-powered equipment have this AGR (or similar) new emission reduction technology?

From https://www.ornl.gov/news/add-device-makes-home-furnaces-cle... :

ORNL’s award-winning ultraclean condensing high-efficiency natural gas furnace features an affordable add-on technology that can remove more than 99.9% of acidic gases and other emissions. The technology can also be added to other natural gas-driven equipment.

Develop an AGR Acidic Gas Reduction add-on part for methane turbines?

Would (Solar Turbines,) consider selling an AGR emissions limiting product or add-on?

ScholarlyArticle: "Nondestructive neutron imaging diagnosis of acidic gas reduction catalyst after 400-Hour operation in natural gas furnace" (2023) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S13858...

FWIU basically no generators have a catalytic converter, because catalytic converters require computer-controlled fuel ignition.

There's also turquoise hydrogen; H Hydrogen from Methane CH4.

westurner3• 1 month ago

There's also turquoise hydrogen; H Hydrogen from Methane CH4.

But then what do you do with the CO2?

graemep• 1 month ago

There is no CO2. It produces carbon instead.

ulfw• 1 month ago

Anything from Trump's largest financial backer is a matter of national security

phtrivier3• 1 month ago

It's too bad that AI is only going to solve climate change and cure cancer, it would have been great if it could also cure asthma and solve rampant corruption.

Anyway, now that half of HN readers are SpaceX shareholder, directly or indirectly, how do we exercise the supreme power over the company, granted to us by capitalism, to ask the board to replace the turbines by another form of energy production in line with science ?

Gud5• 1 month ago

You think Elon Musk would be stupid enough to give away control? He still has >80% of the vote.

phtrivier3• 1 month ago

No. I think people who seriously took part i SpaceX IPO just bought a very expensive lottery ticket, while pretending that it's "being an SpaceX shareholder".

But it's fun to gamble (a bit) ! My personal limit for lottery ticket is 2€. I hope not too many people invested more than that.

And to be fair, SpaceX is probably the one thing for which Elon deserves the most praise.

There is a universe in which he has not been distracted into madness by twitter (and maybe kept Mrs Riley at his side.)

For all I know, we're already on Mars in this timeline.

charcircuit5• 1 month ago

That half of HN readers will only have Class A stock which does not hold enough power to overcome Musk's Class B stock that he owns. But you don't need capitalism to ask the board to do something. You can ask Musk on X.

stymaar5• 1 month ago

You can ask Musk on X.

He'll only listen to you if you're a racist conspiracy theorist though.

bob1029• 1 month ago

I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible. Burning half a million dollars per day in single cycle turbines will eventually cause trouble for accounting.

Running on exactly one kind of fuel is also a bit risky for a few reasons. The grid offers a significantly more diverse fuel mix. It might occasionally be more expensive, but it is also much more reliable.

The grid also offers significantly better fault handling & inertia. An order of magnitude better or more. All those aeroderivative turbines together don't make for much of a brick wall. They are quite fragile compared to what you would find in the turbine hall of a combined cycle plant. GPU load tends to be non-linear and coordinated. To the other side of a circuit it could look like a fault condition when a large cluster fires up a training batch.

finnthehuman• 1 month ago

I can assure HN that they want to be on the grid as quickly as possible.

In a conversation about negative externalities, I don't see the purpose of such a statement. If everything else were equal, nobody would choose negative externalizes just for the fun of it.

Furthermore, a company 'wanting' something is only loosely correlated with the internal political will and resource allocation to achieving it. And says nothing about whether that internal effort is appropriately scaled to the external complexity of the task.

agnosticmantis• 1 month ago

... will eventually cause trouble for accounting.

Accounting has never been a concern in a Musk company or to his shareholders, as is evident from SpaceX IPO. People invest in him because he can make "number go up" regardless of profit and loss.

He's not running conventional profitable businesses, but ponzi-esque growth stories that keep ballooning to no ends without ever reaching a climax.

Nobody cares today what he promised 5 years ago (e.g. Tesla owners making $35k/yr passive income from their cars robotaxi'ing) because they're looking at what he's promising for the next 5 years (probably humanoid robots on Mars with an infinite TAM).

metalman• 1 month ago

there is NO excess grid capacity or excess production capacity for alternative power generation that does not need permiting and enviromental studies.The one company that makes fuel cells that can power data centers is 100% booked, and debating if the long expensive process of doubling production will find a market in 3~5 years. Solar and batteries needs multiple review and perming processes, but for "temporary" power needs the process is almost guaranteed, and with the fix in from DOJ ,they can give a shoot to kill order to protect the countrys vital assets. Personaly I beleive that AI/big data will do nothing but blow hot air anyway,and it sucks for people who have these things close by, but all they can do is move, which might suck even more. The only things that would provide significant noise reduction would be earth berms a lot higher than the turbines that could block and reflect the sound upwards, the berms would have to be continious with no breaks, and possibly "helmholtz resonators/tuned resinators" built from modified shipping cans embeded in the berms to reduce SPL at the worst frequencies. Courts could order remediation efforts to sound proof affected resedents with tripple glazed windows, and other full acoustical sealing methods , and perhaps subsidised air conditioning for the heat, as it's not like they dont have 1.5 trillion dollars laying around.

xnx• 1 month ago

A renewable source would be much better, but aren't natural gas turbines less polluting than coal power plants? There might also be some benefit from no transmission loss.

negergreger• 1 month ago

If nuclear buildout was allowed 20 years ago it wouldn't be a problem today, reap what you sow.

DOJ claims xAI's gas turbines are a matter of 'national and energy security'

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