Even if they’re headquartered elsewhere in the Seattle area rather than the city proper, Microsoft and Amazon are two colossal tech companies famously pouring umpteen zillion dollars per second into AI compute. Nonetheless, on Tuesday, Seattle passed a one-year ban on large data centers.
In April, the Seattle Times reported that the city’s electrical utility, Seattle City Light, was facing a data center problem: four mystery companies were beginning work on five separate large data center projects that would have drawn power from the Seattle grid—sucking up 369 megawatts in a city with only about a gigawatt of capacity. A Seattle City Light representative, Andy Strong, told the Times, “We only have so many engineers. We only have so many project managers,” and added, “It’s going to have an impact.”
According to a story last week in the Guardian, the news alarmed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who told that paper, “That was the first that I, as the mayor, had heard about this.” She and the city council reportedly received 10,000 pro-moratorium emails from residents, and “were happy to move toward a moratorium, especially knowing that there was really strong public support out there for that course of action.”
The Guardian also claims that Seattle is the biggest city so far to pass such a measure. According to a site called U.S. Data Center Moratorium Tracker (which, it should be noted, is a project of the hedge fund Interconnected Capital) there have been 111 local data center moratoria, and 77 are currently active.
The Seattle moratorium passed unanimously, according to a press release on the Seattle City Council website. “I’m grateful to the City Council for their work on this data center moratorium, and I look forward to signing it into law,” Wilson says in the press release.
Councilmember Eddie Lin adds in the release:
“Seattleites should not be subsidizing record profits of large corporations from the AI boom. At the same time, the city hosts smaller co-location facilities that provide data processing for 911 call centers, municipal activities, hospitals, universities, and cancer research. We can support these essential services while also developing appropriate safeguards around mega AI data centers locally and regionally.”
As noted by the Times, the bill lasts one year, and freezes development of data centers beyond a size threshold placed at about 20 megawatts. It also comes with the option to tack an additional six months onto the moratorium. A separate, related city bill passed on Tuesday calls for an analysis of data centers’ power, water, and land use, along with their impacts on residents’ health and employment.
