xAI Offers to Buy 418 Mississippi Homes, and the Fine Print Drops a Noise Lawsuit

Real estate agents have been going door to door in Southaven, Mississippi, on behalf of a subsidiary of Elon Musk's xAI, offering to buy houses on one condition: the seller gives up any claim against the company over noise from the gas turbines that power its data centers. The Guardian first reported the campaign, and The Verge and local outlets have since confirmed the letters.

The buyer is MZX Tech LLC. A letter received by several households, first published by the Mississippi Free Press, is explicit about the terms. MZX "denies all of the allegations against it," the letter says, but "because MZX also requires property for its business purposes" it is offering to purchase real estate "in exchange for, among other things, a release of all claims related to the lawsuit." Signing means the seller "will be unable to recover any damages or other relief from the Haley lawsuit" and cannot bring claims independently.

The scale, according to a recording of a conversation heard by The Guardian: a realtor told one resident the target is 418 homes, with 18 homeowners already agreeing to sell. County records cited in the reporting show five purchases in the Colonial Hills neighborhood since October 9. The area's average home value is about $180,000, a modest outlay next to the cost of the compute cluster the land sits beside. The homes, according to the realtor and the local mayor, will house xAI staff.

The lawsuit behind the release was filed in June 2026 in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Mississippi by three residents, Jason Haley, Preston Herrington and Taylor Logsdon, over what the complaint calls "near-constant noise, vibrations and other nuisance-level harms" from the plant. The filing estimates that more than 10,000 people live in the affected area. xAI denies the allegations and says it has adjusted power output and built walls to reduce sound. A court conference on class certification is pending and the judge has not fixed the class boundaries.

The plant is a former Duke Energy site holding 69 temporary gas turbines, installed to feed three data centers, Colossus I, Colossus II and Macrohardrr, that xAI has built since July 2024 across the Mississippi-Tennessee line around Southaven and Memphis. Federal regulators have found that dozens of the turbines were operating without permits required by federal law.

Renters absorb the consequences without signing anything. Danielle Dillard, a 37-year-old renter less than a mile from the plant, learned in late September that her landlord had accepted a buyout; she was given 60 days to leave, one month after renewing her lease, with no moving costs offered, according to Mississippi Today. Census estimates cited in that reporting put renters in one-third to two-thirds of homes in the affected neighborhoods. Attorney Robert Wiygul, involved in the case, says anyone living in the area, renters included, is eligible for the class.

Mayor Darren Musselwhite has called the buyout good corporate citizenship and "a parallel approach" to cutting noise, noting the company has accelerated plans to replace the temporary turbines with permanent, quieter ones. "Nobody is being forced to be bought out," he said. "It's totally voluntary." That is true in the narrow sense, but a voluntary purchase that removes plaintiffs one signature at a time also shrinks the class the remaining homeowners are litigating on behalf of.

This is the data-center land problem in its next form. The first phase was permits and power. The second is neighbors, and the fastest route out of a nuisance claim is often to buy out the claimants rather than fix the nuisance. For operators racing to build gigawatts inside populated areas, the buyout is becoming a template. For the towns on the other side of it, the test is whether voluntary survives contact with a landlord's signature.