10/29/2025
San Diego Fire-Rescue Responds to Late-Night Fire at UC San Diego Supercomputer Center
La Jolla, CA — October 28, 2025 — Fire crews from the San Diego Fire-Rescue Department (SDFD) responded late Monday night to a fire alarm at UC San Diego’s San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), one of the region’s most critical data and research facilities.
The call came in shortly after 9:28 p.m. for a ringing alarm inside the building located at 9834 Hopkins Drive. When crews arrived, they found smoke coming from a Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) room — an area housing large zinc manganese dioxide battery units used for emergency backup power and voltage regulation.
Firefighters immediately upgraded the call to a first-alarm commercial fire, bringing additional engines, trucks, and hazmat units to the scene. The building’s sprinkler system activated and was able to knock down most of the flames before firefighters entered. Crews then worked m**hodically to extinguish what remained of the fire, which had been contained to several of the battery modules.
According to officials, the affected units were non–lithium-ion batteries, which reduced the risk of explosive ignition compared to lithium systems but still required special handling due to potential electrical and chemical hazards. Firefighters remained on site until around 1:00 a.m. to confirm the fire was fully extinguished and that the surrounding area was safe.
The San Diego Supercomputer Center is home to some of the most powerful computing infrastructure in the country. Its systems support groundbreaking research in climate science, artificial intelligence, genomics, cybersecurity, and earthquake modeling, processing petabytes of data every day for UC researchers and federal partners.
Officials emphasized that maintaining uninterrupted power at the center is crucial. A battery system failure or power disruption could lead to severe consequences — from the loss of live data streams and damage to sensitive servers to the shutdown of temperature-controlled environments essential for the supercomputer’s operation. The SDSC’s battery energy storage system acts as a critical safeguard, ensuring that even brief power fluctuations from SDG&E or the campus grid don’t compromise ongoing research or hardware stability.
Firefighters worked closely with UCSD engineers and subject matter experts throughout the incident. Together, they coordinated building access, managed electrical isolation, and oversaw the safe restoration of the HVAC system — necessary to prevent overheating of the computing cluster once power was restored.
Hazmat teams monitored air quality and water runoff during the cleanup process, while County Hazmat partnered with UC San Diego staff to assess environmental impacts, report chemical inventory details, and assist in the overhaul of damaged battery modules.
By early morning, the situation was under control. No injuries were reported among firefighters or UCSD personnel. The cause of the fire remains under investigation by SDFD investigators and UC San Diego’s environmental health and safety team.
🎥 About the San Diego Supercomputer Center
The SDSC, located on the UC San Diego campus in La Jolla, is a national leader in data-driven research and computing infrastructure. It houses advanced supercomputing systems like Expanse, which supports projects across fields including bioinformatics, AI, oceanography, and disaster modeling. The center’s work enables scientific breakthroughs used worldwide — from predicting wildfire spread to modeling global climate change.
