A fireplace broke out Thursday morning at a knowledge middle in Hillsboro, Oregon, leased by Elon Musk’s X, forcing an prolonged response from emergency crews, in line with a number of sources who spoke to WIRED. The sources required anonymity as they aren’t licensed to talk publicly concerning the firm.
Firefighters arrived on the Hillsboro Expertise Park, in a suburb west of Portland, at 10:21 am, in line with Hillsboro Fireplace and Rescue spokesperson Piseth Pich. They discovered a room with batteries that had been deemed to be concerned within the fireplace. Pich famous that the fireplace had not unfold to different elements of the constructing, however stated the room in query was heavy with smoke. On the time of writing, the crew was nonetheless on the scene.
X didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark from WIRED. It couldn’t be realized whether or not server operations on the knowledge middle had been affected by the incident.
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, the corporate had three knowledge facilities in Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta. This ensured that if one knowledge middle went down, visitors may very well be shifted to the opposite two—and cut up so no single knowledge middle was overwhelmed.
Round Christmas Eve 2022, Musk shut down X’s knowledge middle in Sacramento in an effort to chop prices. The corporate skilled a significant outage within the wake of the shutdown. Over the following six months, the corporate moved greater than 2,573 server racks from the Sacramento facility to knowledge facilities in Portland and Atlanta, in line with inner paperwork. Within the Portland space, X seems to lease house from a constructing that has been linked to Digital Realty, one of many world’s largest builders of information facilities. Digital Realty supplies various ranges of working help at its websites, which might have a number of tenants. It’s unclear if X shares this facility with different corporations. Digital Realty didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
Batteries usually perform as a backup energy supply at knowledge facilities. However lithium-ion varieties may be risky, and points with maintenance and insufficient security measures have contributed to pricey blazes at knowledge facilities world wide. Pich, the Hillsboro fireplace division spokesperson, says he couldn’t recall any earlier fireplace involving batteries within the Oregon area’s many different knowledge facilities.
X’s parent company, xAI, has taken criticism in latest months for its speedy growth of energy capability at a brand new knowledge middle in Memphis, which opened final yr. That facility, which Musk named Colossus, was constructed up at a breakneck pace to coach xAI’s Grok and different AI instruments. The corporate put in greater than 30 methane-powered fuel generators, however as a result of the generators are non permanent, a federal allow for air pollution management is not required, which seems to use a loophole within the Clear Air Act. The ability has drawn widespread criticism from surrounding Black and brown communities, who’re already uncovered to a considerable amount of air air pollution and industrial emissions from different amenities within the space.
