A fire broke It was a Thursday morning, at Hillsboro Data Center, Oregon. Elon Musk’s XMultiple sources told WIRED that the emergency response time was extended. Sources requested anonymity, as they were not authorized to talk publicly about the firm.
Firefighters were dispatched to the Hillsboro Technology Park in an area west of Portland at 10:21am, said Hillsboro Fire and Rescue spokesperson Piseth Pich. Firefighters found batteries in the room that was suspected to be involved with the fire. Pich stated that the flames had not reached other areas in the building but the room was heavily smoked. The crew remained on scene as of 3 pm.
X failed to respond immediately when WIRED asked for a statement. The incident did not affect the server operation at the datacenter.
Before Elon Musk bought TwitterThe company has three data centres 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.
Musk closed down X’s Sacramento data center on Christmas Eve in 2022 in order to reduce costs. After the shutdown, the company suffered a significant outage. According to documents, over the course of the following six months the company relocated more than 2,573 servers racks to datacenters in Portland, Atlanta and Atlanta.
X is leasing a space near Portland from a facility that’s been connected to Digital Realty. Digital Realty has become one of world’s biggest developers of data centres. Digital Realty can provide varying levels operating support for its locations, where one or multiple tenants may be present. Uncertain if X has shared this facility with any other company.
Ryan Young said that in an interview with WIRED, on Thursday, the vice president for Americas operations at Digital Realty stated, “The upcoming election is a very important one. “fire-related incident at our PDX11 facility” The fire had been extinguished and the firefighters had left. “All personnel were safely evacuated, with no reported injuries,” Young stated. “We continue to monitor the situation, prioritizing the safety of our personnel, the integrity of the facility, and minimizing customer impact.”
Young refused to comment about customers.
Battery backups are common in data centers. However, lithium-ion batteries can be unstable and have issues related to maintenance and safety. have contributed Data centers across the world are prone to expensive fires. Pich from the Hillsboro Fire Department says that he cannot recall any fires in data centers around the Oregon area involving battery packs.
X’s parent company, xAI, In recent months, has been criticized for the rapid expansion in power capacity of a new Memphis data center that opened in last year. Musk’s Colossus facility was constructed at a breakneck pace to train xAI Grok, and other AI tools. A company in California installed over 30 gas turbines powered by methane, yet because they are temporary, no federal permits for pollution control were required. This appears to be exploiting a loophole within the Clean Air Act. This facility is attracting widespread criticism, especially from Black and Brown communities who already face a lot of pollution from industrial sources and other nearby facilities.
The story was updated at 11:03 ET on 5/22/25 to reflect additional comments from Digital Realty.
