A fire broke out Thursday morning at a data center in Hillsboro, Oregon leased by Elon Musk’s X, forcing an extended response from emergency crews, according to multiple sources who spoke to WIRED. The sources required anonymity as they aren’t authorized to speak publicly about the company.
Firefighters arrived at the Hillsboro Technology Park, in a suburb west of Portland, at 10:21 am, according to Hillsboro Fire and Rescue spokesperson Piseth Pich. They found a room with batteries that were deemed to be involved in the fire. Pich noted that the fire had not spread to other parts of the building, but said the room in question was heavy with smoke. At the time of writing, the crew was still on the scene.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment from WIRED. It could not be learned whether server operations at the data center had been affected by the incident.
Before Elon Musk bought X, the company had three data centers in Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta. This ensured that if one data center went down, traffic could be shifted to the other two—and split so no single data center was overwhelmed.
Around Christmas Eve 2022, Musk shut down X’s data center in Sacramento in an effort to cut costs. The company experienced a major outage in the wake of the shutdown. Over the next six months, the company moved more than 2,573 server racks from the Sacramento facility to data centers in Portland and Atlanta, according to internal documents. In the Portland area, X appears to lease space from a building that has been linked to Digital Realty, one of the world’s largest developers of data centers. Digital Realty provides varying levels of operating support at its sites, which can have one or more tenants. It’s unclear if X shares this facility with other companies. Digital Realty did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Batteries often function as a backup power source at data centers. But lithium-ion varieties can be volatile, and issues with upkeep and inadequate safety measures have contributed to costly blazes at data centers around the world. Pich, the Hillsboro fire department spokesperson, says he could not recall any previous fire involving batteries in the Oregon region’s many other data centers.
X’s parent company, xAI, has taken criticism in recent months for its rapid expansion of power capacity at a new data center in Memphis, which opened last year. That facility, which Musk named Colossus, was built up at a breakneck speed to train xAI’s Grok and other AI tools. The company installed more than 30 methane-powered gas turbines, but because the turbines are temporary, a federal permit for pollution control isn’t required, which appears to exploit a loophole in the Clean Air Act. The facility has drawn widespread criticism from surrounding Black and brown communities, who are already exposed to a large amount of air pollution and industrial emissions from other facilities in the area.