Nscale AI datacenter plagued by coolant leaks, transformer fire, 10 safety violations
saranormous · x · 2026-10-16
Nscale's AI datacenter suffered repeated liquid-cooling failures due to poor sealant and filter issues: since December workers had to shut down server rows to refill coolant after finding it spurting onto the floor, and even after the faulty system was replaced in June, another major leak hit in September from human error.
Worse on the power side: a transformer caught fire in December after a high-voltage cable left outside for six months failed on connection, arcing and igniting insulation panels. Norway's civil protection directorate found 10 safety violations, including ungrounded high-voltage components and an unregistered in-house electrician team; the case closed in September after fixes.
The facility also lacks comprehensive automated video monitoring—employees physically check every rack hourly—and despite promises of hydropower, it ran cooling on diesel generators until May.
More from Infra
- MLCommons launches MLPerf Endpoints, a benchmark that measures inference endpoints the way buyers actually purchase them — TheKanter · 2026-10-16
- Neocloud M&A decoded: CoreWeave, Nebius, Crusoe, Nscale all bet margins vanish beyond GPU scarcity — AccBalanced · 2026-10-16
- AI-Driven Timing-Aware Power Optimization Uses Learned Ranking With Baseline-Preserving Repair — Amit Sharma · 2026-10-16
- WSL 3.0 ships with native containers and Linux 6.18 kernel, syscall overhead down ~16% — solyarisoftware · 2026-10-16
- Are 22 GB modded RTX 2080 Ti cards a viable budget local LLM option? — Dave86ch · 2026-10-16
- Intel's neural-compressor: SOTA low-bit LLM quantization with FP4/NVFP4 support — HaihaoShen · 2026-10-16