A crazy fire broke out Thursday morning at a data center in Hillsboro, Oregon, rented by Elon Musk’s X, causing a big response from emergency crews, according to a bunch of sources who chatted with WIRED. The sources wanted to stay secret because they aren’t allowed to blab about the company in public. Firefighters rolled up 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 stumbled upon a room with batteries that were thought to be involved in the fire. Pich mentioned that the fire hadn’t spread to other parts of the building, but the room was chock-full of smoke. As of 3:00 pm, the crew was still hanging out at the scene. X didn’t jump to respond to a request for comment from WIRED. Not really sure why this matters, but it wasn’t clear if server operations at the data center took a hit because of the incident.
Before Elon Musk got his hands on Twitter, the company had three data centers in Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta. This setup made sure 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 decided to close X’s data center in Sacramento to save some cash. The company faced a major outage after the shutdown. Over the next six months, more than 2,573 server racks were moved from the Sacramento facility to data centers in Portland and Atlanta, according to internal documents. In the Portland area, X seems to rent space from a building that has ties to Digital Realty, one of the big players in data center development. Digital Realty offers different levels of operating support at its sites, which can have one or more tenants. It’s not clear if X shares this facility with other companies. Ryan Young, vice president of Americas operations for Digital Realty, said in a statement to WIRED on Thursday evening that the “fire-related incident at our PDX11 facility” had been contained and that the fire department had left. “All personnel were safely evacuated, with no reported injuries,” Young said. “We keep an eye on the situation, focusing on the safety of our personnel, the integrity of the facility, and minimizing customer impact.” Young didn’t want to talk about customers.
Batteries are often used as a backup power source at data centers. But lithium-ion types can be unstable, and issues with maintenance and inadequate safety measures have led to costly fires at data centers worldwide. Pich, the Hillsboro Fire Department spokesperson, says he couldn’t remember any other fire involving batteries in the Oregon region’s many other data centers. X’s parent company, xAI, has faced criticism lately for quickly expanding power capacity at a new data center in Memphis, which opened last year. That facility, dubbed Colossus by Musk, was put together in record time to train xAI’s Grok and other AI tools. The company set up more than 30 methane-powered gas turbines, but since the turbines are temporary, a federal permit for pollution control isn’t needed, which seems to exploit a loophole in the Clean Air Act. The facility has drawn lots of criticism from nearby Black and brown communities, who are already dealing with a ton of air pollution and industrial emissions from other facilities in the area. Update 5/22/25 11:03 ET: This story has been updated to include more comments from Digital Realty.
