MZX buys Southaven homes, requiring owners not to join residents' suit

A realtor said the buyout target was 418 Colonial Hills properties

In the Colonial Hills neighborhood on the western flank of Southaven, Mississippi, real estate agents working on xAI’s behalf have gone door to door making market-value offers to buy homes if the owners agree not to join Jason Haley’s class action over noise from the company’s gas-turbine power plant. A realtor told one resident the effort had a target of 418 homes, with 18 homeowners already agreeing to sell, according to a recording of a conversation heard by The Guardian. The plan could potentially take in almost the entire neighborhood, and xAI did not respond to questions about the numbers or its plans.

DeSoto County records show MZX, the xAI subsidiary operating the site, bought five homes since Oct. 9. In a letter handed to Colonial Hills residents, MZX said it “requires property for its business purposes” and was prepared to buy nearby homes with a contractual condition barring participation in Haley’s class action. The realtor and Southaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite said the homes would house xAI staff. The Guardian described the local resistance as part of a broader grassroots backlash against datacenters and reported that some Southaven residents said they had been trampled upon in the gold rush. Three residents filed a June lawsuit alleging “near-constant noise, vibrations and other nuisance-level harms” from the nearby xAI power plant.

Gavin Foust, a paramedic who grew up in western Southaven and lives near Haley, said his elderly neighbors had just agreed to sell and predicted more sales would follow. “They are ideal neighbors and planned to live their rest of their lives in that house but they want to get out of Dodge now because they don’t want to be bothered by these turbines,” Foust said, adding that he would not accept the offer because of its requirement not to sue. “My hearing was damaged when I was in the army but I can still hear this thing, it’s like a jet engine. Why would you put it in a city? Why push people out? It’s reckless and shameful.” He described the neighborhood of affordable 1960s homes and close-knit communities as disrupted by both noise and air pollution.

Elizabeth Rose, a piano teacher whose home is about two miles from the xAI site, said the plant sounded like a continuous airplane engine. “It sounds like an airplane engine but it’s continuous, it’s incredibly loud,” she said. “I’ve been woken up at 2am by it, I’ve been woken up at 3am by it. I sometimes have to just get away from it because it makes me so angry.” The site occupies a former Duke Energy plant with 69 temporary gas turbines, and Rose said she was shocked when its low-level growl began in August of the previous year. “All of a sudden there was a plant there,” she said. “And now I get the feeling they are trying to expand the buyout to the entire neighborhood. It will become Elon Musk’s little playground, basically. Elonville.” A photograph dated 25 October 2026 showed Rose at her home in Southaven.

xAI, which was folded into the SpaceX entity in February, has built three vast datacenters — Colossus I, Colossus II and Macrohardrr — across the Southaven-Memphis conurbation, which spans Tennessee’s border with Mississippi, since July 2024. The Guardian said the rapid construction and all-hours noise from turbines installed without permits had dismayed some locals. Musk was spending up to four nights a week in an Airstream trailer in the Memphis area while personally overseeing the build-out to further develop Grok, the AI chatbot. Another photograph dated 25 October 2026 showed geese flying near one of the xAI datacenters in Southland, Mississippi. The average home price in the area was about $180,000, making the market-value offers a comparatively small outlay for creating what The Guardian described as the world’s largest cluster of AI supercomputers as envisioned by Musk.

During a SpaceX earnings call earlier in October 2026, Musk said, “We’re seeing the fastest growth I’ve ever seen in my life for Grok bot. I’ve never seen anything grow this fast.” The Guardian described Musk as the world’s richest person and a major Republican donor, reporting that he had spent around half a billion dollars helping elect Republicans in the last two election cycles. Donald Trump, who has said opponents of such development would become “backwards and poor,” also supported the expansion.

Jason Haley, one of three plaintiffs, said the turbines sit about half a mile from the home he has owned for 20 years. Haley said he had never considered himself an activist or political in any way but had been driven to distraction by the noise. “There’s a high-pitched hum and then another sound like an airplane over your house,” he said. “It’s been so torturous I can’t sleep, I just leave the house or turn on some music until I fall asleep completely exhausted. It drives you insane. You also lose hope because you’re being ignored or dismissed. There’s no escape.” A photograph dated 25 October 2026 showed Haley near one of the xAI datacenters close to his Southaven home, and another showed him beside a noise-monitoring device near a datacenter.

After what he described as fruitless exchanges with Mayor Musselwhite, Haley lodged the suit and began posting videos on social media while monitoring the noise. He also criticized Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican and proponent of AI development, for describing a curb on datacenters as “surrendering the future of technology to China.” A photograph documented demonstrators rallying in Memphis, Tennessee, on 25 April 2025 in opposition to xAI’s plan to use gas turbines for a new datacenter. “I thought I’d make some noise of my own because of this bullshit,” Haley said. “I didn’t know anything about Elon, still don’t know the man. But our governor saying I don’t love America because I don’t like being tortured by noise? That is just asinine and ignorant. We’ve got to hold people accountable when they are harming other people, I don’t care who you voted for, who you pray for or who your favorite team is.”

xAI denies the allegations in the noise lawsuit and has said it “care deeply about being good neighbors.” The company has varied its power output and built sound-dampening walls. The US Environmental Protection Agency determined that dozens of temporary, truck-sized gas turbines at the xAI premises were running without permits required by federal law. The agency said enforcement of those permit requirements belonged to the state.

No on-site air-pollution monitoring has been done, and the Southern Environmental Law Center estimated that toxic emissions from the turbines, which it described as typically highly polluting, have caused $44m in annual health costs. “It’s been pretty shady from the get-go,” Foust said. “A lot of people in this neighborhood suffer from conditions exacerbated by all the nitrogen oxide, formaldehyde and other garbage put out by these turbines. For kids with asthma or elderly people with COPD [chronic obstructive pulmonary disease] it’s a mess all round. It’s pretty frustrating.”

In April, environmental groups and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People sued in federal court to stop the turbines’ use. The US Department of Justice unsuccessfully tried to block that suit, arguing that xAI technology had been used to wage war on Iran and was therefore required for national security reasons.

In July, xAI agreed with state regulators to transform the power plant into a newer, permanent gas-fired facility by the following summer, a change expected to reduce noise from the temporary turbines. Opponents remained wary because of xAI’s repeated use of gas turbines without a federal permit and separate storm-water violations for which it may face fines. “I’ve had hopes all along that haven’t come through,” Haley said. “The same company said it wasn’t polluting the air. I’m still hopeful but I’m not confident.”

The opposition was not universal, Haley acknowledged. Some residents were not greatly bothered by the noise, while others welcomed an influx of cash into what The Guardian described as one of the poorest states in the union, and local businesses reported a surge in activity. Mayor Musselwhite said the development had brought jobs and opportunity. “This development will produce unprecedented tax revenue for DeSoto county taxpayers that will enhance the quality of life for all,” he said. Musselwhite oversaw a land swap deal with xAI that resulted in a new police and firefighter training center for the city.

Musselwhite said the buyout was “not intended to be a company city at this point.” He said it had never been mentioned to him and that the buyout had multiple purposes: housing for some employees and serving as “a goodwill gesture from a good corporate citizen” for people who viewed the nearby industrial development negatively. He said dealing with the noise was a “top priority” for him, but city monitors had not detected a breach of a local noise-ordinance limit of 70 decibels. Critics pointed to evidence that lower levels of noise — 50 decibels or more, like levels recorded near the power plant — may be linked to adverse health impacts if persistent. Haley said the controversy had drawn the community together and made him question how AI was being “pushed down everyone’s throat.” “Put it this way, I’m now registered to vote,” he said. Rose said her roommate would accept three or four times the value of their home, but she would still oppose a sale. “I wouldn’t take the offer if it was up to me, just to make things difficult for Elon,” she said. Rose also said she hated AI, did not understand why it was invented and refused to use it because she believed doing so would cause the plant to increase its output.