xAI's turbines stay in court, Hermantown approves Google, and Apple's take on AI

Saturday, October 31, was a quieter day for AI news than the rest of the week. But most of what did happen came back to the same question: what does it take to power all this AI, and who gets a say in it?

AI isn't only software. The chatbots and tools people use every day run in data centers, huge buildings full of computers that need enormous amounts of electricity, and those computers are built from chips that are getting harder to find. On Saturday, that physical side of AI was in a courtroom in Mississippi, in a packed council meeting in Minnesota and in a meeting room in South Korea. Apple's new CEO, meanwhile, offered a calmer view of what AI should look like for the people who actually use it.

xAI's turbines go to court

Elon Musk's AI company, xAI, which is now owned by SpaceX, runs large data centers near Memphis, Tennessee, under the name Colossus. Data centers that run AI need a lot of electricity, and to get it quickly, xAI turned to gas turbines: large generators that burn natural gas to make power.

The NAACP sued over those turbines in April, represented by the Southern Environmental Law Center. According to the law center, xAI "installed and operated at least 35 combustion turbines" without the air permits the Clean Air Act requires. The Clean Air Act is the main federal law on air pollution in the United States. The turbines in this case sit at a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi, just across the state line from xAI's data center in South Memphis, according to IBTimes UK. The NAACP links the plant's pollution to asthma, heart disease and other illnesses for people living in nearby homes and schools.

xAI asked the court to throw the case out. It made two main arguments. First, that the turbines are mobile, which would exempt them from these permits. Second, that the NAACP didn't have standing, the legal right to bring the case at all.

As TechCrunch reported on Saturday, Judge Debra M. Brown rejected both. She ruled that the turbines are not "mobile sources" under Mississippi's rules for meeting federal air standards, that the plaintiffs do have standing, and that the part of the law letting citizens bring these suits doesn't violate the Constitution. Her conclusion was short: the plaintiffs' claims will proceed.

It's the second time this month the case has survived an attempt to end it. Earlier in October, the same judge turned down a similar request from the US Justice Department, which had joined the dispute and argued that it alone could end suits like this one.

Abre' Conner, the NAACP's director of environmental and climate justice, called the ruling "another important victory." She added: "xAI cannot operate gas turbines without the required permits." TechCrunch said it had reached out to SpaceX for comment, and its article didn't include a response.

It's worth being clear about what this ruling is and isn't. Nothing has been decided yet about whether xAI broke the law. The judge only decided that the case can go on. A separate request from the NAACP, asking the court to shut the turbines down while the case continues, is still waiting for a ruling.

A Google data center gets the green light

Meanwhile, in northern Minnesota, a fight that has gone on for months came to a vote. Late on Friday night, the city council of Hermantown, just outside Duluth, unanimously approved a giant Google data center, MPR News reported. The council signed off on a development agreement, a special use permit and a plan to take the site apart if the data center is never finished or is abandoned later.

The vote had been set for Monday, October 26, but that meeting was canceled after protests. It was moved to Tuesday, and then to Friday. When it finally happened, it came after about four hours of public comment, and most of the people who spoke were against the project. The city limited attendance to 85 people, closed an overflow room and offered a way to join online instead. Some residents were angry about that. One of them, Brian Bergeron, asked: "How is that representative government?"

The scale explains why people care. The plan covers 1.7 million square feet on more than 200 acres in a rural residential part of Hermantown. It has been cut from four buildings to three, with a height limit of 33 feet, but each building would still be larger than six football fields.

It is expected to need 500 megawatts of electricity. A megawatt is a million watts, the same watts printed on a light bulb. According to the Citizens Utility Board of Minnesota, 500 megawatts is roughly as much power as all the homes in Minneapolis, St. Paul, Duluth and Rochester use combined.

The plan did change along the way. Google dropped its request for up to $80 million in property tax breaks, and the project is now expected to bring in about $3 million a year in property taxes. Google also agreed to monitor private wells near the site, and a $210 million agreement covers taking the site apart if the project is scrapped. Supporters at the meeting said Google had listened and that the project had changed as a result. Critics said the changes didn't go far enough.

It isn't over. Three lawsuits are challenging the project: one over the environmental review, one over how the city changed its zoning to allow it, and one over who owns the land. The city attorney said none of them stopped the council from voting. Minnesota's Public Utilities Commission also still has to approve the deal for Google to buy electricity from the local utility, Minnesota Power.

Hermantown isn't alone. Data centers have become a real local political issue across the US, and TechCrunch noted growing public backlash against them heading into the midterm elections on Tuesday, November 3. In Hermantown itself, three first-time candidates are running for two open council seats, largely because of the data center.

Apple's CEO on AI

Next, Apple. John Ternus became Apple's CEO at the start of September, and he has been asked about AI a lot since. Apple has often been described as behind in AI, especially after it delayed a more capable version of Siri, which finally launched this summer.

In an interview with Steven Levy at Wired, picked up by TechCrunch on Saturday, Ternus acknowledged that "everyone has an opinion" about where Apple stands. His own view: "I really like where we're at."

He said Apple is "absolutely going to leverage AI" in its products, but drew a line. "We don't want to ship AI for AI's sake," he said. His point was that people shouldn't have to think about whether something happened because of AI or because of more traditional software. What matters, in his telling, is whether Apple built something people really love.

Levy also asked him about one of the biggest ideas in tech right now: AI agents. An agent is an AI system that doesn't just answer questions but goes off and does tasks for you, often across several apps. Some people in the industry think agents could eventually make apps unnecessary, since you'd just tell an agent what you want. Ternus allowed that this could make life easier, but said that making products is a deeply human and personal thing.

It's a quieter pitch than much of the industry's, where companies often lead with the word AI itself. Apple is betting that people care more about whether a feature works well than about what technology is behind it.

Altman visits Samsung

And finally, chips. On Saturday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman met about 50 executives from Samsung Group in Yongin, just south of Seoul, according to a Bloomberg report published by The Edge Malaysia. The executives came from Samsung's electronics, financial and biotechnology businesses. They talked about how AI could reshape industries and the way companies make decisions over the next decade.

There's a practical side to the visit too. AI data centers need huge amounts of memory chips, the parts that hold information while a computer is working, and Samsung is one of the biggest makers of them. Right now there's a shortage, and it is pushing chip prices up. According to the report, memory makes up roughly a third of what gets spent on data centers, and the five biggest AI infrastructure players plan to spend more than $3 trillion in the coming years.

The meeting builds on an earlier partnership for Samsung to supply memory chips for Stargate, OpenAI's giant data center project, and for the two companies to work together on AI data centers, including floating ones offshore. Samsung is also using more AI inside its own business, from research and manufacturing to marketing.

Altman is the latest American tech leader to make the trip. Nvidia's Jensen Huang and AMD's Lisa Su have each visited South Korea twice since last year, as companies compete for the chips that AI depends on.

The big picture

Put Saturday's stories side by side and a pattern shows up. AI is often talked about as if it lives in the cloud, weightless and everywhere. In practice, it lives in very specific places: a power plant in Southaven, a few hundred acres outside Duluth, chip factories in South Korea.

Those places come with real trade-offs: air quality, electricity, land, tax money and the price of parts. And more and more people want a say in how those trade-offs are made. A federal judge decided a pollution case should be heard. A city council voted after hours of mostly critical comment, with lawsuits and regulators still to come. Voters in many places will weigh in on Tuesday.

Apple's CEO, from a different angle, made a related point: the technology only matters if it ends up making something people actually want. For now, the biggest questions about AI aren't only about what the software can do. They're about the buildings, the power and the chips behind it, and about who gets to decide.