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Elon Musk quietly buys a $1 billion gas turbine company to power Grok

Fred Lambert | Jul 14 2026 - 4:32 pm PT

59 Comments

Elon Musk has quietly bought APR Energy, a Jacksonville-based company that operates a fleet of mobile gas and diesel turbines totaling more than 1 GW of generation capacity.

The self-styled champion of a “solar electric economy” now owns a fossil fuel power company — and he’s buying it to feed the electricity-hungry data centers running xAI’s Grok.

A billion-dollar deal with no announcement

There was no press release. The acquisition surfaced through a Federal Trade Commission early termination notice — transaction number 20261350, dated May 14, 2026 — which cleared the deal without further antitrust review.

The implied value clears $1 billion, backed out from disclosures showing a minority stakeholder received roughly $50.4 million for a 5% stake. Fortress Investment Group had picked up APR’s assets in late 2024 and rebranded the business as New APR Energy LLC before flipping it to Musk.<br>Advertisement - scroll for more content

APR doesn’t run a traditional power plant. It deploys trailer-mounted gas turbines and reciprocating diesel and natural gas engines that can reach full power in under 10 minutes and be installed in days rather than the years it takes to permit and build a fixed plant. The fuel is natural gas and diesel. This is fossil-fuel combustion, packaged to move.

It’s the same technology Musk has already been running — controversially — to keep Grok online.

Burning gas to run a chatbot

xAI’s Colossus and Colossus 2 supercomputers in Memphis train and serve Grok. They have been doing it, in large part, on unpermitted gas turbines.

As we covered last month, the Department of Justice intervened to keep Musk’s xAI turbines running in South Memphis, arguing the unpermitted units are a matter of “national, economic, and energy security.” The NAACP, the Southern Environmental Law Center, and Earthjustice had sued under the Clean Air Act after xAI installed as many as 35 turbines without permits or pollution controls.

The turbines could emit over 2,000 tons of smog-forming nitrogen oxides, according to the environmental groups. In Boxtown, the predominantly Black neighborhood closest to the facility, the cancer risk already runs four times the national average. xAI officials said they planned to “copy and paste” the same turbine strategy for Colossus 2.

Buying APR Energy outright gives Musk a captive supply of exactly this kind of generation — drop-in gas turbines he can place next to a data center without waiting on grid interconnection.

Powering Grok’s porn problem

What all that gas is actually powering is worth stating plainly.

Well over half of Grok’s traffic is now driven by adult content — pornographic image and video generation, erotica, and sexually explicit AI “companion” chats — according to reports from former xAI employees and multiple investigations this summer. xAI has leaned into it, shipping “companion” avatars like the anime character “Ani” built for romantic and adult interaction.

It has also produced genuinely alarming failures. Grok has been used to “digitally undress” real people, and watchdogs have flagged cases where the outputs appeared to depict minors. Musk has reportedly pushed back internally against adding guardrails.

So the picture is this: Musk is burning fossil fuels, in neighborhoods already carrying a disproportionate pollution burden, to run a chatbot whose top use case is generating porn.

To be fair, Musk’s data centers now also power Grok’s competition after demand was way lower than Musk anticipated.

From “solar electric economy” to gas peakers

None of this is easy to square with the brand Musk spent 15 years building.

This is the man who chaired SolarCity, folded it into Tesla, and told the world that solar-plus-battery storage was humanity’s path off fossil fuels. As recently as January, he stood at Davos and announced that Tesla and SpaceX would each build 100 GW of US solar manufacturing capacity per year. We reported in May that he had abandoned that “solar electric economy” vision to burn gas for xAI, and in December he quietly dropped “sustainable” from Tesla’s mission statement altogether.

Owning a fossil fuel company is the logical endpoint of that trajectory. The champion of clean energy is now a fossil fuel operator.

Electrek’s Take

Let’s be clear about what’s happening, because the “AI needs power” framing gives it too much cover.

Yes, the AI power crunch is real, and gas turbines are available faster than grid interconnections or utility-scale solar. If Musk were being consistent with everything he’s ever said, this is precisely the moment he’d be deploying Tesla Megapacks and solar to power his own compute...