A fire tore through an unfinished building at a $3.2 billion AI data center, and firefighters say they had almost no idea what they were walking into.
The blaze broke out in early June at the Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York, a site built on a former coal mine on Lake Ontario. Firefighters reportedly found no working fire alarm, no suppression system, and three dead hydrants. The safety data sheets crews are legally entitled to review reportedly burned up in the fire, though Barker Fire Chief Steve Matisz said he wasn't actually sure that was true. Matisz said his crew went in "kind of blind," facing heavy black smoke from chemicals they couldn't identify.
That uncertainty matters because the building has an unusually tangled ownership structure. TeraWulf owns and operates the data center on land leased from a company run by its own CEO. Fluidstack, a UK-based AI firm, will operate the facility. Google holds warrants for a future 14 percent stake and guarantees Fluidstack's lease payments. Anthropic is among the AI companies whose compute demand the site exists to serve.
Four companies, one fire, and apparently no one who could hand a fire chief a straight answer about what was burning.