Small data center proposed at Starbucks HQ building in Sodo

Something is brewing at Starbucks Center in Seattle's Sodo neighborhood - and it's not coffee.

The owners of the building are exploring the possibility of a "small-scale" data center on the ground floor.

The space has been empty since an Amazon Fresh pickup site left in January 2024. The news was first reported by The Daily Journal of Commerce.

Starbucks leases most of the building for its headquarters.

Kevin Daniels, one of the building's co-owners, said Tuesday they filed a conceptual site plan for a data center with the city of Seattle to gauge the feasibility of a data center - but they don't have a specific tenant in mind.

"I actually resisted it, but one of my partners was aware of the fervor of the (data center) market and started to educate me on the issue," he said.

But wait, didn't the Seattle City Council just ban new data centers within city limits last week? Not exactly.

The City Council unanimously voted to enact a one-year moratorium on new large data centers within city limits that use more than 20 megavolt-amperes (roughly equivalent to 20 megawatts). This 45,600-square-foot data center, which was proposed just days after the moratorium, would be under the limit, according to permit records.

The site at 2401 Utah Ave. S. isn't just home to Starbucks' headquarters. It's a historic, multitenant space with a nine-story main office building and a six-story commercial building to the south with ground floor retail and warehouse uses.

Both buildings were built in the 1910s and housed Sears for almost a century.

Sears added a showpiece tower in 1915 to mark its massive catalog warehouse and opened a retail store at the site a decade later. Until it shuttered in 2014, it was the oldest continuously operating Sears store in the world, according to real estate developer Nitze-Stagen, which bought the building in the early 1990s alongside Daniels.

Even before Sears abandoned the location, Starbucks became the new symbol for the building. The coffee giant put its headquarters there in 1997 and added its green-and-white mermaid logo to the tower.

Starbucks' recently announced plans to open a large corporate office in Nashville, Tenn., had many in Seattle uncertain about the company's future in Seattle. But the company has not indicated it plans to move its headquarters out of the Sodo property.

"The Nashville office will be a complement to our global and North America headquarters in Seattle where we will maintain a large presence," Starbucks Executive Vice President Sara Kelly said in a statement in April.

Starbucks' lease for its Sodo headquarters, which was renewed in 2018, runs through 2038, with no options for "termination," according to a July credit rating report by Morningstar.

Any data center at the location wouldn't overlap with any of Starbucks' leased space, according to permit records. Conceptual plans show a data center would take up to 25,600 of 1.3 million square feet in the main office building, and 20,000 of 180,000 square feet in the south building.

It's still unclear if the space has the infrastructure and power systems to sustain a data center, according to Daniels.

He said he's "of the old school" and "still mixed on whether it's a good fit" for the space.

Around 10 possible tenants, mostly home improvement businesses, have expressed interest in the space, Daniels said.

"We've started exploring all the options," he said.

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This story was originally published June 16, 2026 at 9:42 AM.