xAI accused of pollution over Memphis supercomputer | Hacker News Reader

xAI accused of pollution over Memphis supercomputer

politico.com

57 pointstroupo18 comments

Every year, it becomes more and more apparent that the philosophy of tech companies is to break or avoid the law and hope you're too big for the government to do something about it.

As with any life hack, if you make life hacks your whole personality, you turn into a scumbag. Trust me, bro about those robo taxis. They're safe we tested them.

I was under the impression that they specifically picked this location because there is a big power plant nearby which they can hook into. Why are they building their own turbines?

Power plant needs to follow environmental reqs which leads to higher energy cost. Burning fuel on-site with no emissions control is cheaper

Sure, but the difference between burning propane without a filter and coal with a filter is probably not that large. Propane is a clean-burning fuel.

I’m sure they are conveniently skirting some regulations in the name of speed, and should not be allowed to do so, but is there hard data on pollution levels increasing around the area? Haven’t seen it in any of these reports, instead there are FLIR videos of “pollution” coming out of the turbines.

If your neighbor fired up 35 construction/welding generators across the street you'd notice the smell, right?

These things are turbines, each the size of a shipping container.

I don't think you need IR evidence to know that it would be unpleasant.

Probably not, because there would be a significant distance between industrial and residential zoning, and in this age catalytic converters, scrubbers, carbon capture etc are all mandatory.

Except they are not, because all of these turbines are "emergency" generators which are completely exempt from any environmental regulations, due to being designed well....for emergencies. But it looks like xAI found a loophole that says they can operate them 364 days a year and it's still legal, so no, they don't actually do any emissions control on them.

And that certainly could be shown by simple air quality metrics, would you agree? Which hasn’t featured in any of the reporting so far. Showing thermal images capturing heat plumes does not equal air pollution.

Correct. And I wish someone would do that.

the real weakness of the "AI industry" seems to be the massive increase in CO2 emissions required

if I was trying to kill it politically that's exactly what I'd focus on

> the real weakness of the "AI industry" seems to be the massive increase in CO2 emissions required

> if I was trying to kill it politically that's exactly what I'd focus on

Except that approximately all of one entire political party (who happen to be currently "in charge" of things) believe that CO2 is good for plants, therefore it's good always for everything and we should put more of it into the atmosphere as quickly as possible, especially if it further enriches outdated obsolete greedy pollution-loving science-hating overlords. Anyone who disagrees is a witch or a terrorist.

"We Went to the Town Elon Musk is Poisoning"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3VJT2JeDCyw&pp=ygUJZWxvbiB0b...

Musk doing Musk things

Url changed from https://simonwillison.net/2025/Jun/12/xai-data-center/ which points to this.

The Politico article linked at the top of the same post has far more detail.

Ok thanks, changed.

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