'I can't live in this:' Mississippi town besieged by power plant noise

Residents of Southaven, Mississippi have been co-existing with a constant whirring, “like an airplane hovering” over their homes for months, Lauren Fichten writes for CBS News. The source is a plant powering Elon Musk’s xAI data centers. When resident Jason Hayley wrote to Southaven Mayor Darren Musselwhite regarding the issue, Musselwhite recommended he sell his house to xAI employees.

After Haley emailed Musselwhite once and the constant noise continued, he sent another message. CBS News reports:

"Anyone else I can reach out to?" Haley wrote to Musselwhite. "It's almost 4 am and I can hear it from my bed. The high pitch and roaring combined is full force at this time. My ears are ringing. I can't live in this. How was this ever approved?"

In a Facebook post, the mayor wrote that Southaven residents who opposed the data center do so because of Elon Musk’s “high-profile political stances." In an earlier response to from Haley, Musselwhite wrote “I will give you some unsolicited advice from an older man, be careful with whom you associate so you don't damage your credibility.”

The U.S. has over 4,000 data centers, some of which require power plants to operate, which can be built with “little warning to residents,” Fichten writes. xAI dubbed Colossus, its data center just north of Southaven, “the world's largest AI supercomputer.”