According to Hillsboro Fire and Rescue spokesman Piseth Pich, rescuers arrived at the Hillsboro Technology Park at 10:21 am in a neighborhood west of Portland. They discovered a place with chargers believed to be in the fire. Although Pittsburgh claimed that the area in question was smoke-filled, the fire had not spread to other areas of the tower. The team was still on the scene at the time of writing.
X did not respond to a request for comment from WIRED right away. No information was available as to whether the tragedy had affected the data center’s site operations.
Elon Musk owned X before it acquired it in Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta. This made sure that if one information center went down, visitors had been diverted to the other two and divided so that no one data center was overrun.
Musk shut down X’s data centre in Sacramento on Christmas Eve 2022 in an effort to lower prices. Following the closure, the firm experienced a significant interruption. According to internal documents, the company moved more than 2, 573 site containers from the Sacramento ability to data centres in Portland and Atlanta over the course of the next six months. X appears to be leasing place from a tower in the Portland area that has ties to Digital Realty, one of the largest data center developers in the world. At its websites, which can have one or more landlords, Digital Realty offers varying rates of operating help. Is it unknown whether X and other businesses use this service. A request for comment was never instantly responded to by Digital Realty.
| Do you have a hint? |
|---|
| Are you a current or former X individual interested in learning about what’s happening? We’d prefer to hear from you. Contact the writers firmly on Signal at @kylie using a non-work phone or computer. 01, @mollytaft. 76, or @peard33.24. |
In data centres, chargers frequently serve as a backup power source. However, lithium-ion varieties can be dangerous, and expensive fires at data centers around the world have resulted from mismanagement and poor security measures. According to Pich, the spokesperson for the Hillsboro fire department, he can’t recall any prior incidents involving batteries in the region’s numerous other data centers.
X’s parent company, xAI, has been criticized in recent months for its rapid growth of strength power at a fresh, last year opened data centre in Memphis. To educate xAI’s Grok and another AI tools, that service, which Musk affectionately called Colossus, was constructed at an insane rate. The business installed more than 30 methane-powered oil turbines, but because they are temporary, a national enable for waste power is not required, which makes it seem to exploit a flaw in the Clean Air Act. The neighborhood Black and brown areas, who are already exposed to a lot of professional and air pollution, have voiced widespread criticism for the facility.
