A fire broke out Thursday morning at a data centre in Hillsboro, Oregon, leased by Elon Musk’s company, X. The facility, located in the Hillsboro Technology Park west of Portland, experienced the incident at approximately 10:21 a.m., according to Hillsboro Fire and Rescue spokesperson Piseth Pich.
Fire crews arrived to find a room containing batteries believed to be involved in the fire. While the flames did not spread to other areas of the building, the affected room was filled with smoke. Emergency crews remained on site into the afternoon, with operations continuing as of 3:00 p.m.
X did not respond to a request for comment, and it remains unclear whether the fire disrupted server operations at the facility. Sources familiar with the matter, who spoke on condition of anonymity due to company policies, confirmed to WIRED that the facility is used by X.
Prior to Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter (now X), the company operated three primary data centres in Sacramento, Portland, and Atlanta, designed to provide redundancy in the event of an outage.
The Sacramento centre was shuttered on Christmas Eve 2022 as a cost-saving measure. Following the closure, a major power outage occurred, leading the company to transfer over 2,500 server racks to its other sites, including the Portland-area facility.
The Hillsboro site is associated with Digital Realty, a global data centre operator that provides varying levels of support and may host multiple tenants in a single facility. Ryan Young, Digital Realty’s vice president of operations for the Americas, confirmed that the fire at their PDX11 site was contained and that there were no injuries.
“All personnel were safely evacuated,” Young said, adding that the company is continuing to monitor the situation while prioritising safety and operational continuity. He declined to comment on individual clients.
Backup batteries, such as the lithium-ion units found in many data centres, are commonly used to maintain power during outages. However, these batteries can pose fire risks if not properly maintained. Pich noted that she could not recall any similar battery-related fires in the area’s other data centres.
The fire comes amid broader scrutiny of Musk’s infrastructure expansion, particularly a large-scale data facility in Memphis, Tennessee, launched by his AI company xAI. The Memphis site, known as “Colossus,” houses methane-fueled turbines and has drawn criticism for sidestepping federal air pollution permitting due to their temporary status.
The facility has drawn widespread criticism from surrounding Black and Latinx communities, which are already exposed to high levels of air pollution and industrial emissions from other facilities in the area.