xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

1. There isn't even a penalty. Journalists literally had to fly drones with thermal imaging to prove the gas turbines were indeed on. Then some non-profits had to use their own money to file a lawsuit

2. Corruption could get even the lawsuit kicked out:

> Enter the Federal Government and the Department of Justice, who pushed the courts to dismiss the suit as a matter of national security, stating that the xAI models were needed for "artificial-intelligence innovation that supports the Department of War’s military operations." So, residents are left without legal means of contesting these developments, barring individual claims and damages.

For example, if a data center is illegally running gas turbines, the penalty could be that the data center must be shut down for 3 years and no equipment can be removed from the data center during that time.

With financial penalties, there's always calculus on whether the penalty is high enough to deter the action. But the only reason they'd want to, for example, use illegal power generators at a data center is to run the data center. Losing access to 100% of the value of that data center for 3 years would make the calculus easy: it wouldn't be worth it for the companies. They'd lose the entire reason for doing it and so much of the capital investment in equipment as it depreciated during those 3 years.

With AI companies believing the market is worth trillions, it's hard to imagine a financial penalty high enough to deter illegal actions. It might need to be in the hundreds of billions - a level which they probably can't pay given their current resources and which governments wouldn't levy. Not that they'll essentially confiscate a data center and its hardware for multiple years as a penalty either.

Something isn't really a big deal, it doesn't make sense to stick it to a company.

This is better at balancing the public interest of legal compliance against the public interest in the product the company provides.

It's basically the same trade-off with set in criminal punishments in general. If we made it it the death penalty for jaywalking or littering, we would have a lot less of it. Seems like a slam dunk right? Why don't we just do that?

And the government would have to pay to fight and might be on the hook if they lost.

And “clearly breaking the law” isn’t always clear; I don’t k ow anything about this particular case but it sounds like zoning or applying utility laws to non-utility companies or environmental regulations being used to make construction financially untenable. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for opposition to off-grid natural gas turbines; you don’t get much cleaner off grid power that works 24x7.

Just a reminder that when you're building a business, having land and a datacenter ready and cannot be switched on, with idle staff, costs the business money.

xAI could only draw 7-8MW from the grid and needed to run 10s of 1000s of H1000s. They shipped in 15 gas turbines as a more permanent onsite power plant while TVA/MLGW worked on expanding the grid supply to 150-300MW.

So you can get upset at musk all you want, but he has a business to run, and waiting for a full grid build out isn't practical.

> TLDR: Corrupt crooks have sabotaged the normal careful legal-compromise route, so they are partly to blame when American communities seek hard-line measures instead.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193606

Sure we do. We just don't use those mechanisms because the law doesn't move fast enough. That 7/2027 deadline was probably calculated as being not worth it to pursue legal damages for since court fights work slowly.

Now closing up those "stalling" loopholes... I don't know enough about the justice system to really make a judgement call on that.

Do we punish other crimes?

From everything I've seen the populist uprising is happening because 99% of the people shouting don't know anything about data centers other than "bad".

I mean, that's the good faith argument anyways. I suspect you don't actually care, and just also believe in South African white genocide etc.

Starlink v3 satelites launch next month, the first starmind sats based nvidia chips sometime next year, large new factories for the needed solar panels are already half built outside of bastrop texas

Did Musk even need approval? At the time weren't they both non-public companies pretty much entirely controlled by him personally?

But if you're talking about Musk himself, I'm not gonna stop you.

>xAI Ignores Laws And Profits: Rules For Thee, Not For Me

To what it is now, as if this is just healthy competition.

Comments that people don't like, which are clearly not just "spam" get flagged all the time. It's ridiculous