8 ms·

xAI, SpaceX, and the Race for AI Buildout

149 points by speckx 3mo ago

culi 3mo ago
> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first
- miyoji 3mo ago
  The HN crowd that doesn't seem to get it is like that because they're either white collar criminals themselves, or they work for such criminals.
  - etchalon 3mo ago
    "It's only a crime because it's against the law." - someone, inevitably
    - torh 3mo ago
      "Why should you go to jail for a crime someone else ... noticed" — Bob Loblaw
    - efitz 3mo ago
      Of course that’s a silly turn of phrase but there is a grain of truth. Most people believe that the law should mirror the ethics or morality of the society, and absent something clearly harmful, most people don’t understand why something with nobody clearly harmed should be illegal.
  - culi 3mo ago
    > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  Similarly, I have a rant from last night [0] which connects it to Federal versus State laws and enforcements. > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193606
  - culi 3mo ago
    Or even state vs local. These developers have a LOT of money and often use it to pass state level legislation that prevents cities or counties from having a say in these projects. Take Hood County where a Texas senator prevented them from considering a construction pause. Or West Virginia’s Power Generation and Consumption Act which completely banned local government oversight. Or Georgia’s HB 1059 Siting Mandates. I could go on and on but the point here is the playing field is not level. These data centers often have the power to completely skirt local zoning laws and regulation. And even when they do it illegally, there's rarely any consequences
- jackb4040 3mo ago
  I mean it depends what you mean by "we". There are laws on the books to do so, they've just never been used against Epstein associates like Musk. We have a surface system of politics and laws, and then a deep system. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
  - culi 3mo ago
    > The Colossus I Data Center was brought online in 122 days from breaking ground to operation. Some hail that as an achievement, but others (like myself) see it as a brutal pace to avoid having to answer pesky questions like "How will this affect the nearby area?" and "What sort of mitigation plans to do you have for the data center's waste?" The data center is powered by dozens of unpermitted gas turbines, which they initially refused to acknowledge were running until journalists and groups used thermal imaging to prove they were indeed on and spewing toxins into the air (including smog, formaldehyde, and other nasty things). This resulted in a suit from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) on behalf of the NAACP for violations of the Clean Air Act. Their claim was that the company operated without public oversight or accountability for these illegal constructions and sought legal stoppage until proper accounting can be done of the effects of said turbines. This is what I'm talking about. A non-profit and random journalists shouldn't be the ones holding them accountable in the first place. And a "lawsuit" is hardly accountability either. People need to go to prison for white collar crime. > 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. And this is the reason why a "lawsuit" isn't accountability. When the company can just pay some politicians to get it dismissed.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      The federal government has tons of power but I'm like 99% sure the process for exercising it isn't "send a note to the courts saying this illegal stuff is actually super important for war n stuff" and then they just get lawsuits thrown out... right?
- deepsun 3mo ago
  Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?
  - devin 3mo ago
    Are you really out here stanning white collar crimes? The reason this is ok is because people aren’t angry enough about it? Your comment absolutely boggles the mind.
  - palmotea 3mo ago
    > Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing? I never supported what Uber, either. Why would you assume anyone did?
  - miyoji 3mo ago
    What? Do you think that public opinion drives prosecution decisions? If that were true, no one would go to jail for marijuana possession.
  - kg 3mo ago
    Lots of people did complain or actively take steps to punish them for lawbreaking, yeah?
  - anonymousiam 3mo ago
    I have still never taken an Uber. I have always used taxis and I like them more because of the regulations. The difference is cost is minimal now because the taxis had to adjust their rates to remain in business.
- politician 3mo ago
  > They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. Do we punish other crimes?
- efitz 3mo ago
  Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects). 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.
  - jcranmer 3mo ago
    > government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally The government has no obligation to apply the law equally, although they are prohibited from applying the law unequally to achieve certain discriminatory aims.
  - ceejayoz 3mo ago
    > However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally… I wish I lived in your world.
    - efitz 3mo ago
      I don’t have that kind of clout or money, but Elon does.
      - ceejayoz 3mo ago
        Back up a sec. Your definition of “equally” only applies to trillionaires?
        3mo ago
- basisword 3mo ago
  >> The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first 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".
  - johnnyanmac 3mo ago
    When all they see is rising bills, louder environments, and less jobs: yes. all they know is "bad".
- elorant 3mo ago
  “Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.
- johnnyanmac 3mo ago
  >we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. 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.
- ballon_monkey 3mo ago
  > unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center 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.
  - qchris 3mo ago
    I'm going to be blunt; this is a wildly bad-faith argument. You started the quote right after the important word: illegal. > the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center Illegal. These turbines are illegal. What xAI under Musk's direction is doing is illegal. A business that must break the law to be practical isn't a business, it's a criminal organization operating by hurting people (which is WHY it's illegal to run gas turbines like this), and both it and those running it must be held accountable. You're arguing that it's fine to break the law if it would otherwise cost a business money. I don't accept that, and nobody else in this community should either.
    - ballon_monkey 3mo ago
      > this is a wildly bad-faith argument No. Calling it illegal is just something people do because they hate musk. They fell into a loop hole and had no permits as they were technically allowed if they stayed in 1 spot for less than 364 days. EPA later determined they did not qualify and required permits, permits were later granted. Musk operated in a grey area to run his business to avoid having an idle data center while other people dragged their feet. I purposely cut off `illegal` because calling it `illegal` was bad faith to begin with. But it's not unexpected that musk haters will come out raising banners in protest.
    - s1artibartfast 3mo ago
      Are they actually missing required permits? what does the government say? Why haven't they gone in with the police? I expect they have permission or dont need it. At the very least, they have permission of the federal government which threw out all of the court cases against them.
nearlyepic 3mo ago
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- deleted 3mo ago
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BeetleB 3mo ago
I don't like Elon Musk. I don't like Grok or xAI. Or X. Or Twitter before. I also don't like articles that try to bias readers with irrelevant details: > This includes Grok, which has thus far been involved in controversies including but not limited to: > Spreading antisemitic slurs and conspiracies while calling itself "Mecha-Hitler" > Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children > Acting as a mouthpiece for Elon's racist belief in South African white genocide I stopped reading right there.
- nearlyepic 3mo ago
  Hardly irrelevant. The purpose is establishing a pattern of abusive behavior so this can't be dismissed as a "misunderstanding".
  - BeetleB 3mo ago
    Then show me a pattern of flouting regulations (which I can easily believe he has). His terrible views on unrelated issues are irrelevant.
    - lukeschlather 3mo ago
      The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions, if your read news about xAI you should be familiar with the examples.
      - BeetleB 3mo ago
        > The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions Elon (or Grok) espousing racist views is not flouting data center related regulations. His business practices are.
        ibero 3mo ago
        you don’t think “Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children“ is illegal somewhere/anywhere?
utopiah 3mo ago
Who cares, Musk will soon solve also those pesky problems by putting data centers in space, it is easy. Also next year FSD but for real this time. /s
- maerF0x0 3mo ago
  solely about the FSD part of your comment. I got a chance to ride in a 2024 edition of the system this year and I was shocked at how good it was. Was it level 5? of course not. But from my very lay understanding of level 3 it seemd to have achieved all that I would have assumed a computer could reasonably do.
  - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
    None of that matters, unless you can buy a Tesla with FSD enabled. This has been promised so many times, for so many years, that it's become a bit of a joke.
    - brandonagr2 3mo ago
      You can, https://www.tesla.com/fsd https://www.tesla.com/fsd Are you trying to invent your own definition for self driving and quibble that supervision negates what the car is doing?
      - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
        I'm not redefining self driving, tesla is: https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-self-driving-give-up-promise-autonomy/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-se... When they first started talking about it in the mid-teens, it was pitched as "read a book or take a nap" That is not what Tesla is selling in 2026.
      - WheatMillington 3mo ago
        >Are you trying to invent your own definition for self driving Are you?
throwaway27448 3mo ago
[flagged]
- palmotea 3mo ago
  > Whoever thought it was ok to approve the purchase of xAI by SpaceX deserves to be hung, dug up, hung again, and repeated 4x over. I want this person's liver on my dinner plate. 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.
maerF0x0 3mo ago
[flagged]
- namuol 3mo ago
  On the scale of injustice, these are cosmically distant crimes.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
exabrial 3mo ago
I hate to sounds like I'm defending them... but that's like every startup. Taxi Pendants? Never heard of her - Uber/Lyft Gambling laws? Pssht - Polymarkets
- culi 3mo ago
  Yes, a lot of startups are only successful because what they are doing suddenly isn't illegal anymore because it's being done with an app. Cory Doctorow has written about this in his book Enshittification
- johnnyanmac 3mo ago
  I think we're far past calling the 7th largest stock on the S&P owned by the richest man in the world a "startup". Startups can't do something like this at scale.
- WheatMillington 3mo ago
  Aah yes that scrappy $1.7 trillion start-up.
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  Oh - I was and still am absolutely against Uber's tactics in expanding to cities. I still do not use Uber unless I travel to countries where that's the only option.
mft_ 3mo ago
While organisations are only ever hit with affordable financial penalties, it's rational for them to weigh up the likely penalty vs. the opportunity cost of not doing something illegal in their decision-making. If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally and criminally liable in such cases.
- mdasen 3mo ago
  There's also other options than brutally punitive financial penalties or holding execs personally responsible. 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.
  - mft_ 3mo ago
    I agree with almost everything you wrote, but... confiscation and inability to operate at a location (as you suggest as a penalty) still ultimately boils down to a financial penalty for an organisation. It feels especially severe in this case (law breaking by a data center operator) because of the high cost and high depreciation rate of GPUs and supporting hardware. If you take a different field of business, you can still imagine an organisation making the calculation that operation for a period of time --before their illegality was discovered and then acted upon by the authorities-- would still be worthwhile even if confiscation was the end result. (In some odd cases, this is close to the actual business model.) If you want to deter hyper-rich companies, you could shift to fining them a meaningful percentage of their annual turnover or even their market capitalisation.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
pseudosavant 3mo ago
It's been flagged now. Upset too many Elon bots and fanboys.
- alex1138 3mo ago
  Unaccountable flagging is a massive problem here and it's amazing the site doesn't have more protections for astroturfing Comments that people don't like, which are clearly not just "spam" get flagged all the time. It's ridiculous
  - tstrimple 3mo ago
    Many seem to consider it a feature. Including the mods. Certainly feels organized at times.
- johnnyanmac 3mo ago
  Intersting that the title was also changed from the current top level header: >xAI Ignores Laws And Profits: Rules For Thee, Not For Me To what it is now, as if this is just healthy competition.
  - alex1138 3mo ago
    I grow increasingly skeptical of HN's "moderation"
    - Freedom2 3mo ago
      The moderation here typically leans to whatever generates the most curious discussion, rather than sticking with inflammatory titles, even if it's what the author intends. In some way, I trust HN to become the "editors" of the internet in a sense, as they have everyone's best interest in heart of course. As the legendary PG once wrote: "What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for"
      - 3mo ago
totallygeeky 3mo ago
Hi all, pleasantly surprised to see my own article posted to HN before I did! I did space to push anything out about this for the most part, so thank you to speckx. Anyway, happy to see the understanding reception here, I think it's worth continuing to drive home that these data centers have immediate impacts on the areas around them, which are disproportionately minorities and poor. If you liked this article there's plenty more on my website, and feel free to ask any questions.

149 points by speckx 3mo ago

culi 3mo ago

> In the latest example of corporations existing outside of the law, SpaceX (who is for some reason the controlling entity of xAI now) announced they'll be removing the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center... by July 2027. This is the thing the HN crowd doesn't seem to get whenever a post is on here about data centers. They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first

miyoji 3mo ago
The HN crowd that doesn't seem to get it is like that because they're either white collar criminals themselves, or they work for such criminals.
- etchalon 3mo ago
  "It's only a crime because it's against the law." - someone, inevitably
  - torh 3mo ago
    "Why should you go to jail for a crime someone else ... noticed" — Bob Loblaw
  - efitz 3mo ago
    Of course that’s a silly turn of phrase but there is a grain of truth. Most people believe that the law should mirror the ethics or morality of the society, and absent something clearly harmful, most people don’t understand why something with nobody clearly harmed should be illegal.
- culi 3mo ago
  > It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. — Upton Sinclair
Terr_ 3mo ago
Similarly, I have a rant from last night [0] which connects it to Federal versus State laws and enforcements. > 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49193606
- culi 3mo ago
  Or even state vs local. These developers have a LOT of money and often use it to pass state level legislation that prevents cities or counties from having a say in these projects. Take Hood County where a Texas senator prevented them from considering a construction pause. Or West Virginia’s Power Generation and Consumption Act which completely banned local government oversight. Or Georgia’s HB 1059 Siting Mandates. I could go on and on but the point here is the playing field is not level. These data centers often have the power to completely skirt local zoning laws and regulation. And even when they do it illegally, there's rarely any consequences
jackb4040 3mo ago
I mean it depends what you mean by "we". There are laws on the books to do so, they've just never been used against Epstein associates like Musk. We have a surface system of politics and laws, and then a deep system. Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.
- culi 3mo ago
  > The Colossus I Data Center was brought online in 122 days from breaking ground to operation. Some hail that as an achievement, but others (like myself) see it as a brutal pace to avoid having to answer pesky questions like "How will this affect the nearby area?" and "What sort of mitigation plans to do you have for the data center's waste?" The data center is powered by dozens of unpermitted gas turbines, which they initially refused to acknowledge were running until journalists and groups used thermal imaging to prove they were indeed on and spewing toxins into the air (including smog, formaldehyde, and other nasty things). This resulted in a suit from the Southern Environmental Law Center (SELC) on behalf of the NAACP for violations of the Clean Air Act. Their claim was that the company operated without public oversight or accountability for these illegal constructions and sought legal stoppage until proper accounting can be done of the effects of said turbines. This is what I'm talking about. A non-profit and random journalists shouldn't be the ones holding them accountable in the first place. And a "lawsuit" is hardly accountability either. People need to go to prison for white collar crime. > 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. And this is the reason why a "lawsuit" isn't accountability. When the company can just pay some politicians to get it dismissed.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    The federal government has tons of power but I'm like 99% sure the process for exercising it isn't "send a note to the courts saying this illegal stuff is actually super important for war n stuff" and then they just get lawsuits thrown out... right?
deepsun 3mo ago
Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing?
- devin 3mo ago
  Are you really out here stanning white collar crimes? The reason this is ok is because people aren’t angry enough about it? Your comment absolutely boggles the mind.
- palmotea 3mo ago
  > Yes, and big part of it is public is ok with that. For example, did you protest while Uber was breaking many local laws while growing? I never supported what Uber, either. Why would you assume anyone did?
- miyoji 3mo ago
  What? Do you think that public opinion drives prosecution decisions? If that were true, no one would go to jail for marijuana possession.
- kg 3mo ago
  Lots of people did complain or actively take steps to punish them for lawbreaking, yeah?
- anonymousiam 3mo ago
  I have still never taken an Uber. I have always used taxis and I like them more because of the regulations. The difference is cost is minimal now because the taxis had to adjust their rates to remain in business.
politician 3mo ago
> They are often times doing outright illegal things and we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. Do we punish other crimes?
efitz 3mo ago
Of course the government has permission to punish crime. However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally, and would be subject to discovery to see if they were being corruptly influenced (there is organization and international funding for the anti-data center movement in the US”; there is very little grassroots opposition other than typical NIMBYism you see in all development projects). 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.
- jcranmer 3mo ago
  > government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally The government has no obligation to apply the law equally, although they are prohibited from applying the law unequally to achieve certain discriminatory aims.
- ceejayoz 3mo ago
  > However government officials might find themselves in a courtroom having to demonstrate how they applied the law equally… I wish I lived in your world.
  - efitz 3mo ago
    I don’t have that kind of clout or money, but Elon does.
    - ceejayoz 3mo ago
      Back up a sec. Your definition of “equally” only applies to trillionaires?
      - 3mo ago
basisword 3mo ago
>> The populist uprising against them is happening because people have tried everything else first 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".
- johnnyanmac 3mo ago
  When all they see is rising bills, louder environments, and less jobs: yes. all they know is "bad".
elorant 3mo ago
“Move fast and break things”. That was the gospel of Facebook that drove an entire industry and was preached by every entrepreneur in existence. So now that it’s applied on a global scale the things that are broken are society itself. Well we reap what we sow.
johnnyanmac 3mo ago
>we simply don't have the mechanisms to punish "white collar crime" the way we punish other crime. 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.
ballon_monkey 3mo ago
> unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center 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.
- qchris 3mo ago
  I'm going to be blunt; this is a wildly bad-faith argument. You started the quote right after the important word: illegal. > the illegal, unpermitted gas turbines they've been running at their Memphis Colossus data center Illegal. These turbines are illegal. What xAI under Musk's direction is doing is illegal. A business that must break the law to be practical isn't a business, it's a criminal organization operating by hurting people (which is WHY it's illegal to run gas turbines like this), and both it and those running it must be held accountable. You're arguing that it's fine to break the law if it would otherwise cost a business money. I don't accept that, and nobody else in this community should either.
  - ballon_monkey 3mo ago
    > this is a wildly bad-faith argument No. Calling it illegal is just something people do because they hate musk. They fell into a loop hole and had no permits as they were technically allowed if they stayed in 1 spot for less than 364 days. EPA later determined they did not qualify and required permits, permits were later granted. Musk operated in a grey area to run his business to avoid having an idle data center while other people dragged their feet. I purposely cut off `illegal` because calling it `illegal` was bad faith to begin with. But it's not unexpected that musk haters will come out raising banners in protest.
  - s1artibartfast 3mo ago
    Are they actually missing required permits? what does the government say? Why haven't they gone in with the police? I expect they have permission or dont need it. At the very least, they have permission of the federal government which threw out all of the court cases against them.

nearlyepic 3mo ago

[flagged]

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]

BeetleB 3mo ago

I don't like Elon Musk. I don't like Grok or xAI. Or X. Or Twitter before. I also don't like articles that try to bias readers with irrelevant details: > This includes Grok, which has thus far been involved in controversies including but not limited to: > Spreading antisemitic slurs and conspiracies while calling itself "Mecha-Hitler" > Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children > Acting as a mouthpiece for Elon's racist belief in South African white genocide I stopped reading right there.

nearlyepic 3mo ago
Hardly irrelevant. The purpose is establishing a pattern of abusive behavior so this can't be dismissed as a "misunderstanding".
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  Then show me a pattern of flouting regulations (which I can easily believe he has). His terrible views on unrelated issues are irrelevant.
  - lukeschlather 3mo ago
    The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions, if your read news about xAI you should be familiar with the examples.
    - BeetleB 3mo ago
      > The things you're calling irrelevant actually flout a number of regulations in various jurisdictions Elon (or Grok) espousing racist views is not flouting data center related regulations. His business practices are.
      - ibero 3mo ago
        you don’t think “Creating widespread non-consensual nude images of primarily women and children“ is illegal somewhere/anywhere?

utopiah 3mo ago

Who cares, Musk will soon solve also those pesky problems by putting data centers in space, it is easy. Also next year FSD but for real this time. /s

maerF0x0 3mo ago
solely about the FSD part of your comment. I got a chance to ride in a 2024 edition of the system this year and I was shocked at how good it was. Was it level 5? of course not. But from my very lay understanding of level 3 it seemd to have achieved all that I would have assumed a computer could reasonably do.
- bigfishrunning 3mo ago
  None of that matters, unless you can buy a Tesla with FSD enabled. This has been promised so many times, for so many years, that it's become a bit of a joke.
  - brandonagr2 3mo ago
    You can, https://www.tesla.com/fsd https://www.tesla.com/fsd Are you trying to invent your own definition for self driving and quibble that supervision negates what the car is doing?
    - bigfishrunning 3mo ago
      I'm not redefining self driving, tesla is: https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-self-driving-give-up-promise-autonomy/ https://electrek.co/2025/09/05/tesla-changes-meaning-full-se... When they first started talking about it in the mid-teens, it was pitched as "read a book or take a nap" That is not what Tesla is selling in 2026.
    - WheatMillington 3mo ago
      >Are you trying to invent your own definition for self driving Are you?

throwaway27448 3mo ago

[flagged]

palmotea 3mo ago
> Whoever thought it was ok to approve the purchase of xAI by SpaceX deserves to be hung, dug up, hung again, and repeated 4x over. I want this person's liver on my dinner plate. 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.

maerF0x0 3mo ago

[flagged]

namuol 3mo ago
On the scale of injustice, these are cosmically distant crimes.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

exabrial 3mo ago

I hate to sounds like I'm defending them... but that's like every startup. Taxi Pendants? Never heard of her - Uber/Lyft Gambling laws? Pssht - Polymarkets

culi 3mo ago
Yes, a lot of startups are only successful because what they are doing suddenly isn't illegal anymore because it's being done with an app. Cory Doctorow has written about this in his book Enshittification
johnnyanmac 3mo ago
I think we're far past calling the 7th largest stock on the S&P owned by the richest man in the world a "startup". Startups can't do something like this at scale.
WheatMillington 3mo ago
Aah yes that scrappy $1.7 trillion start-up.
BeetleB 3mo ago
Oh - I was and still am absolutely against Uber's tactics in expanding to cities. I still do not use Uber unless I travel to countries where that's the only option.

mft_ 3mo ago

While organisations are only ever hit with affordable financial penalties, it's rational for them to weigh up the likely penalty vs. the opportunity cost of not doing something illegal in their decision-making. If we want to prevent such behaviour (and in case it's not clear from the above, I think we should) then we either need far more brutally punative financial penalties, or for executives to be held personally and criminally liable in such cases.

mdasen 3mo ago
There's also other options than brutally punitive financial penalties or holding execs personally responsible. 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.
- mft_ 3mo ago
  I agree with almost everything you wrote, but... confiscation and inability to operate at a location (as you suggest as a penalty) still ultimately boils down to a financial penalty for an organisation. It feels especially severe in this case (law breaking by a data center operator) because of the high cost and high depreciation rate of GPUs and supporting hardware. If you take a different field of business, you can still imagine an organisation making the calculation that operation for a period of time --before their illegality was discovered and then acted upon by the authorities-- would still be worthwhile even if confiscation was the end result. (In some odd cases, this is close to the actual business model.) If you want to deter hyper-rich companies, you could shift to fining them a meaningful percentage of their annual turnover or even their market capitalisation.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

pseudosavant 3mo ago

It's been flagged now. Upset too many Elon bots and fanboys.

alex1138 3mo ago
Unaccountable flagging is a massive problem here and it's amazing the site doesn't have more protections for astroturfing Comments that people don't like, which are clearly not just "spam" get flagged all the time. It's ridiculous
- tstrimple 3mo ago
  Many seem to consider it a feature. Including the mods. Certainly feels organized at times.
johnnyanmac 3mo ago
Intersting that the title was also changed from the current top level header: >xAI Ignores Laws And Profits: Rules For Thee, Not For Me To what it is now, as if this is just healthy competition.
- alex1138 3mo ago
  I grow increasingly skeptical of HN's "moderation"
  - Freedom2 3mo ago
    The moderation here typically leans to whatever generates the most curious discussion, rather than sticking with inflammatory titles, even if it's what the author intends. In some way, I trust HN to become the "editors" of the internet in a sense, as they have everyone's best interest in heart of course. As the legendary PG once wrote: "What are you excessively curious about — curious to a degree that would bore most other people? That's what you're looking for"
    - 3mo ago

totallygeeky 3mo ago

Hi all, pleasantly surprised to see my own article posted to HN before I did! I did space to push anything out about this for the most part, so thank you to speckx. Anyway, happy to see the understanding reception here, I think it's worth continuing to drive home that these data centers have immediate impacts on the areas around them, which are disproportionately minorities and poor. If you liked this article there's plenty more on my website, and feel free to ask any questions.