xAI runs eight converted jet engines in Mississippi as data centre power crunch deepens

xAI is running eight converted jet engine turbines at a Mississippi data centre, Tom's Hardware reported on 3 November. The permits allow a 25 percent higher cap on volatile organic compounds than would otherwise apply. The report ties that allowance to carbon monoxide emissions from the same units.

The Southern Environmental Law Center has already challenged Mississippi's approval of the turbines, the New York Times reported, as cited by Tom's Hardware. The group argues xAI has not shown the jet-powered units meet emissions standards for specific pollutants including formaldehyde. It accuses the company of undercounting projected emissions from the site's power sources. It previously sued xAI over gas generators installed without the required permits in an area with more than 100,000 residents.

The dispute is the sharpest version of a question now running through the whole sector. Who pays for the power behind AI, and who lives with the exhaust?

A £20bn plan on a biomass site

On the same day, Drax Group said it had signed an agreement with Brookfield and Brookfield's UK-based AI infrastructure platform Radiant, according to CNBC. The deal covers a data centre on the Drax Power Station estate in North Yorkshire. The asset manager estimates total investment, semiconductors included, could exceed £20 billion ($26.8 billion), with £2.5 billion for the first phase. Drax shares rose 8.8 percent in early trading in London, CNBC reported.

The phasing is specific. The first 100MW is targeted for the first quarter of 2028, a further 500MW between 2028 and 2031, and more than 1GW at the site after that, per CNBC. The Register noted on 3 November that the £20 billion headline is ambition rather than money committed. Phase one still needs planning permission, regulatory and network approvals, commercial agreements, final investment decisions and, in its words, a tenant.

Drax's regulatory filing is the primary document here, and it is cautious. The first phase is conditional on approvals and on securing a suitable tenant, according to Data Center Dynamics. The site offers 1,000 acres, 4GW of grid access and 2.6GW of active dispatchable generation from the existing wood pellet plant.

"If constructed in full, this project could become one of the largest data centers in the UK, attracting billions in inward investment," Drax Group CEO Will Gardiner said, according to Data Center Dynamics.

The carbon accounting is contested. The Guardian reported on 3 November that Drax is the UK's single largest emitter of carbon dioxide. It produces almost 5 percent of the country's electricity by burning woody biomass pellets. Those emissions are not counted against the UK government because Drax claims equivalent carbon is absorbed by growing trees. Ministers have promised the plant a "much more limited role" in future. Its subsidies fall to half the current £2 million a day from 2027 to 2031.

Data Center Dynamics added that the announcement follows a government rejection. North Yorkshire Council, the University of York and Drax had bid for a data centre of up to 1.2GW at the same site under the AI Growth Zone scheme. The earlier application called the facility the world's largest "carbon negative data center", even though the plant is one of the UK's largest emitters. Radiant CEO Mahdi Yahya said in a statement carried by CNBC that designing and operating from the UK would give British researchers and startups "access to frontier compute at home".

China moves the voltage, not the fuel

Envision Energy says it has completed the first commercial data centre deployment of an integrated 800-volt DC power system, Tom's Hardware reported on 3 November. The company has been testing its Dubhe Controller, backed by the Dubhe Energy Foundation Model, since August. The tests run at its Galaxy AI data centre in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia. The campus is planned to scale to 3GW and eventually support up to one million AI accelerators, according to the company's press release.

The engineering claim is about conversion stages. Conventional data centres step grid power down through several conversions before it reaches a rack. Envision's system converts directly from 10kV medium-voltage AC to an 800V DC bus, cutting the size of the conversion apparatus. It pairs a solid-state transformer with battery storage for second-scale support and minute-scale backup. Millisecond coordination between the two absorbs GPU load swings locally. Whether the efficiency gains hold at 3GW is not something a single site can answer.

The Register's take on Drax cuts the other way, and both views should be kept in sight. It reported that the UK government estimated last week that all of Britain's existing data centres use around 2GW of electricity. Drax's proposed development alone could eventually need more than 1GW. The first phase would draw from the grid. Drax wants to supply up to 500MW directly from existing generation under a long-term power purchase agreement, potentially running AI servers on electricity from imported wood pellets. A government-backed Contract for Difference covering April 2027 to March 2031 lets Drax request permission to redirect up to 500MW. Ministers and the Low Carbon Contracts Company would have to agree.

The alternative case: batteries first

A report from researchers at Georgetown and Duke universities argues that batteries should be the first choice for data centre demand, Canary Media reported on 3 November. U.S. utilities are planning more than 60GW of new gas plants to serve data centres, according to the report. Around 90GW of behind-the-meter gas generators is proposed nationwide. Batteries are cheaper than round-the-clock gas where hours of stored energy solve near-term needs. They are also modular in a way gas plants are not, which matters if demand shifts.

Ian Hitchcock, a report co-author at the Duke Initiative for Science and Society, said there is "a lot of inertia and status quo pressure" pushing behind-the-meter resources toward natural gas, Canary Media reported. Jackson Ewing of Duke's Nicholas Institute said batteries are already showing serious deployment momentum, unlike advanced geothermal or next-generation nuclear. BloombergNEF now forecasts U.S. energy storage surpassing 11,000 gigawatt-hours by 2036, a 30 percent increase on its forecast six months earlier. Data centre demand is driving much of the growth.

That is an argument about risk allocation as much as emissions. If data centre proposals stall, utility customers can be left paying for overbuilt gas. States have only begun to address that stranded-asset problem.

Local limits and a rebrand

Public patience is thinning. Tom's Hardware reported on 2 November on a database of more than 10,000 public comments. Over 90 percent opposed data centres, water was the top concern, and only 21 percent mentioned AI. In 73 percent of meetings there were no data centre supporters. In Minnesota, Google's 200-acre project won approval after the company scaled it down and dropped an $80 million tax break request, Tom's Hardware reported the same day.

Naming is shifting too. The Verge reported on 3 November that OpenAI is quietly renaming data centres as "compute campuses". Tom's Hardware reported the same day that the company reportedly sees the 2028 presidential election becoming an AI issue.

Cooling is where the operational detail lives. Data Center Knowledge reported on 2 November that direct-to-chip liquid cooling is now standard for dense AI workloads. The hard part is measurement: liquid temperature, pressure, flow rate and level, plus leak detection and coolant health indicators such as pH, turbidity, conductivity and refractive index. Dew point is the risk to watch, since pipe surfaces below ambient dew point condense water near equipment. A common practice is keeping coolant supply at least 2°C above measured ambient dew point.

Then there is the option that avoids the grid entirely. The Register reported on 31 October that Google's Suncatcher satellite, launched earlier in the month, returned a haiku generated by an onboard Gemma 4 model during a pass over Svalbard. Google's own figures put the inference at roughly 20 tokens. That is about $0.000012 through its cloud API at Gemma 4 26B pricing of $0.15 per million input tokens and $0.60 per million output tokens, excluding input costs. Google calculates that if launch costs fall to $200/kg, amortised launch cost of roughly $810 to $7,500 per kW per year could be comparable to U.S. terrestrial data centre electricity spending of about $570 to $3,000 per kW per year. It predicts SpaceX could get there around 2035.

For now the jet engines in Mississippi and the biomass boilers in Yorkshire are the real answer to the same question. Neither has finished its permitting fight.