Controversial global enthusiasm for building datacenters raises justifiable fears after watching the trillionaire, Elon Musk, ignore responsibilities of duty of care toward local communities.
In fact, this will be a joint enterprise, Musk tweeted back shortly after, “To be precise, Dell is assembling half of the racks that are going into the supercomputer that xAI is building.”
From other announcements, we know that Dell and Supermicro will build the Grok supercomputer cluster using Nvidia’s latest Blackwell GPU platform, announced in March.
The image accompanying Dell’s tweet showed lines of rack-bound Nvidia servers still in their plastic-wrapped shipping state, which underlines that the project to build the dedicated facility in an unconfirmed location is still in its early stages.
A US regulator ruled on Thursday that Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company had acted illegally by using dozens of methane gas turbines to power huge datacenters in Tennessee.
xAI has been fighting for a year and a half over truck-sized gas turbines the company had parked near its Colossus 1 and 2 facilities, arguing to local authorities that the electricity-generating turbines were exempt from requirements for air quality permits.
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared on Thursday that the generators were not exempt. In its ruling, the agency revised the policies around gas turbines, saying that operating the machines still requires air permits even if they are used on a portable or temporary basis, as had been the case.
When xAI first installed the portable turbines at Colossus 1, it took advantage of a local county loophole allowing the operation of generators without permits so long as the machines did not sit in one place for more than 364 days. At one point, up to 35 of these generators were powering Colossus 1. xAI eventually received permits for 15 turbines at Colossus 1 and is now operating 12 permitted machines at the site.
Under the EPA’s new ruling, the permitting for these turbines would fall under federal law. It is unclear how or whether the government will penalize companies who are not in compliance. The EPA spokesperson did not respond to the Guardian’s questions about enforcement.
The ruling is a win for community activists in Memphis who have been battling xAI’s use of the portable turbines as long as the generators have been in use. They say the datacenter, which sits a few miles from historically Black neighborhoods, has been adding extra pollution to already overburdened communities.
“Our communities, air, water and land are not playgrounds for billionaires chasing another buck,” said Abre’ Conner, the director of environmental and climate justice for the NAACP, which initiated a lawsuit against xAI last July saying the unpermitted turbines were violating the Clean Air Act.
,Methane gas turbines pump harmful nitrogen oxides into the air, which are known to cause cancer, asthma and other upper respiratory diseases.
Retired, living in the Scottish Borders after living most of my life in cities in England. I can now indulge my interest in all aspects of living close to nature in a wild landscape. I live on what was once the Iapetus Ocean which took millions of years to travel from the Southern Hemisphere to here in the Northern Hemisphere. That set me thinking and questioning and seeking answers.
In 1998 I co-wrote Millennium Countdown (US)/ A Business Guide to the Year 2000 (UK) see https://www.abebooks.co.uk/products/isbn/9780749427917
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