The fire broke According to multiple sources, the X lease by Elon Musk forced emergency crew responses to force first responders to an extended response, according to multiple sources. Sources need to be anonymous because they do not have the right to speak publicly about the company.
Firefighters arrived at Hillsborough Tech Park in the western suburbs of Portland at 10:21 a.m., according to Piseth Pich, a spokesman for Hillsborough fire and rescue. They found a room with a battery that was considered involved in the fire. Pichi noted that the fire did not spread to other parts of the building, but said there was smoke in the room in question. While writing, the crew was still on the scene.
X did not respond immediately to Wired’s comment request. It is not possible to know whether server operations in the data center are affected by events.
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter, the company had three data centers in Sacramento, Portland and Atlanta. This ensures that if one data center goes down, traffic can be transferred to the other two data centers and separated, so none of them is flooded.
On Christmas Eve 2022, Musk closed the Sacramento X data center to cut costs. After the closure, the company experienced a major power outage. In the next six months, the company moved more than 2,573 server shelves from the Sacramento plant to data centers in Portland and Atlanta, according to internal documents. In the Portland area, X appears to have leased space from buildings related to digital real estate, one of the world’s largest data center developers. Digital Realty provides different levels of operational support on its website and can have one or more tenants. It is not clear whether X shares this facility with other companies. Digital Real Estate did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The battery usually acts as a backup power supply in the data center. But lithium-ion varieties can be variable, and the maintenance and insufficient security measures have led to expensive combustion in data centers around the world. Hillsboro Fire Department spokesman Pich said he doesn’t remember any fires involving batteries in many other data centers in the Oregon area.
X’s parent company XAI has been criticized in recent months for its rapid expansion of a new data center in Memphis, which opened last year. Musk’s facility called Colossus was built at an astonishing speed to train Xai’s Grok and other AI tools. The company has installed more than 30 methane-powered gas turbines, but since the turbines are temporary, it does not require a federal contamination permit, which seems to exploit a loophole in the Clean Air Act. The facility has attracted widespread criticism from the surrounding black and brown communities who have been exposed to large amounts of air pollution and industrial emissions from other facilities in the area.
