Elon Musk added another company to his portfolio earlier this year, and this one runs on fossil fuels. As reported by Engadget, Musk acquired APR Energy in May, with no public announcement from either party. The deal only came to light after Electrek spotted a regulatory filing, and the purchase is estimated at around $1 billion.
APR Energy makes mobile gas and diesel turbines that can be loaded onto trailers and deployed quickly. That kind of portable, heavy-duty power generation has a very obvious use case in Musk’s world right now: keeping AI data centers running.
xAI, Musk’s artificial intelligence company, is already under legal pressure over its energy choices. The company was sued for using mobile turbines at its data center in Southaven, Mississippi, with the complaint alleging violations of the Clean Air Act. Since that lawsuit was filed, the number of turbines at the site has reportedly grown. Now, the Department of Justice is moving to have the case dismissed, citing the US military’s use of xAI’s Grok chatbot as a reason to protect the company’s operations.
Owning APR directly gives Musk a cleaner supply chain for that kind of setup. Instead of contracting turbines from a third party, xAI could pull from an in-house fleet. It also gives him flexibility to scale up power at other data center locations without going through outside suppliers or waiting on grid connections, which are notoriously slow to build.
The acquisition fits a pattern in the AI industry more broadly. Data centers are power-hungry by nature, and the surge in demand driven by large language models has made energy supply one of the biggest constraints on AI growth. Companies across the sector are signing deals with nuclear operators, building out solar farms, and in some cases, turning back to fossil fuels to fill the gap. Musk is simply cutting out the middleman.
What makes this particularly striking is the distance it puts between Musk and his older public statements. Around a decade ago, he called continued fossil fuel use “the dumbest experiment in history, by far.” He built much of his public image around Tesla’s electric vehicles and solar energy through SolarCity. Now his companies are not only running diesel turbines but also reportedly exploring the construction of a natural gas pipeline in Texas.
None of this is entirely surprising given the scale of what xAI is trying to build, but it does raise real questions:
- How much of xAI’s energy footprint will rely on fossil fuels long-term?
- Will regulators look more closely at data center emissions as AI infrastructure keeps expanding?
- And what does owning a turbine company mean for Musk’s other businesses, like Tesla, that are still selling an environmental vision to consumers?
For now, the APR acquisition looks like a practical fix to an immediate problem. But it also signals that the energy demands of the AI race are pushing even the most prominent clean-tech advocates toward the very sources they once publicly rejected.
