Sid Salter
- Mississippi’s early success in the data centers boom has resulted in historic economic development growth and the promise of more to come. That’s the good news.
The rapid increase in demand for artificial intelligence as the technology is adopted and implemented by public- and private-sector businesses is driving the surge in data center construction worldwide. Mississippi has been involved in several of those mammoth economic transactions.
Cybersecurity resource Programs.com provides some useful background information on the topic. The website’s editors offered this succinct analysis of the current data center landscape in a report updated on Feb. 13:
“As of this month, there are currently 10,867 data centers worldwide across 174 countries. Demand for data centers is projected to nearly triple by 2030. The U.S. leads with 3,971 data centers. The United Kingdom ranks second with 499, followed by Germany with 476, China with 368, and France with 338.
“Between now and 2030, companies worldwide are expected to invest nearly $7 trillion in building and upgrading data centers. Global data center power usage is expected to increase to 219 GW over the next five years, enough to power roughly 180 million U.S. homes.
“Data centers are present in more than 170 countries, and nearly 40% are located in the U.S., where states with multiple data centers create more than $30 billion in additional annual economic output,” the report concluded.
In Mississippi, there are four planned data centers, including Amazon’s Madison Data Centers, Compass Data Centers in Meridian/Lauderdale County, Elon Musk’s iAI Colossus 3 in DeSoto County, the AVAIO Digital Partners Taurus Data Center Hub in Rankin County, and the Amazon Data Center in Warren County.
Musk’s xAI enterprise, which merged with its SpaceX company in recent days, is already utilizing the methane turbine technology in the Colossus 1 and Colossus 2 data centers in Memphis, which is planned for Colossus 3 in Mississippi. Musk’s social media platform X, formerly Twitter, is also owned by xAI, which created the Grok AI chatbot and image generator.
Initial opposition to Mississippi’s data center developments emanated from Kelley Williams, chairman of the Bigger Pie Forum. BPF claims to promote “market-driven economic growth for a bigger and brighter Mississippi” and is a frequent critic of the state’s large utilities.
This week, after a period of protests and threats, there is news that the Southern Environmental Law Center and Earthjustice, on behalf of the NAACP, sent a legal notice of intent to sue Musk’s xAI and its subsidiary MZX Tech LLC, claiming the company’s use of dozens of natural gas-burning turbines requires a federal permit in violation of the Clean Air Act.
The upcoming lawsuit in Mississippi is the NAACP’s second legal case regarding the Colossus projects in Memphis.
As reported in the Memphis media, the NAACP’s first notice of intent to sue was filed in June 2025, involving similar allegations regarding the company’s datacenter in Memphis. That lawsuit did not materialize after the company obtained permits that made it compliant with the federal law.
For Mississippi Gov. Tate Reeves, the Mississippi Development Authority and the majority of both houses of the Mississippi Legislature, the state’s early success in the data centers boom has resulted in historic economic development growth and the promise of more to come. That’s the good news.
Yet across the country, local opposition to data centers has ranged from tepid to intense. A group called datacenterwatch.org claims to have documented $62 billion in data center projects. that were delayed or blocked by protests in 2024-25. That opposition has been based in great measure on the old “NIMBY” gambit – not in my back yard.
Mississippi is poised to build on historic gains in a range of high-tech fields that rely on AI, supercomputing, and related technologies, including healthcare, finance, manufacturing, construction, and more.
The greater one’s understanding of the potential that AI offers in solving critical problems confronting us now and, in the future, the more it becomes obvious that this is essential technology.
