Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson backs data center moratorium
Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson said Friday she is backing a one-year moratorium on new large data centers in the city, even as developers withdraw their plans following a torrent of public backlash.
Seattle City Councilmembers Eddie Lin and Debora Juarez and Council President Joy Hollingsworth said Thursday they plan to introduce legislation this month to bar new data centers for a year. With council approval, such a moratorium could later be extended by six months, according to their proposal.
"Thousands of Seattleites have made their voices heard - we should not be subsidizing the massive and record profits of tech corporations pursuing large AI data centers in our city," Lin, the bill's prime sponsor, said in a news release announcing the proposal. Councilmembers Maritza Rivera and Dan Strauss later said they also support the moratorium, giving the measure a five-vote majority.
Wilson's office said in a blog post Friday that the mayor was partnering with council members on the moratorium, adding that city departments would work on policies that ensure residents and businesses do not pay increased utility costs as a result of large data centers. The city is also pushing for the state to regulate the impacts of large data centers.
Last month, The Seattle Times reported that four companies had approached Seattle City Light about building five large data centers with a combined maximum demand of 369 megawatts - roughly one-third of what the city uses on an average day.
City Light said serving that much additional load would make its job of providing power to existing residents more difficult. The city's 30 current data centers are relatively small. The utility said it was drafting new terms that large data center customers would have to agree to, likely including having to find their own power source outside of the city's supply.
The outcry against the proposed centers was fierce.
Seattle elected officials received more than 54,000 messages raising "intense public alarm," according to Wilson.
Within a week, City Light said that one company canceled its plans, although the utility didn't identify the company. Microsoft and Amazon said it wasn't them. On Thursday, another developer, Tukwila-based Sabey, told The Times it was pulling out, too.
The company had initially asked for 68 megawatts of power at its existing Tukwila campus within City Light territory. Sabey said while it was aware of the discussions happening in Seattle, a combination of internal design constraints ultimately made its project impractical to pursue.
"After further evaluation, we determined the project did not have a clear path forward and was no longer viable, and we formally withdrew the request," Sabey said in an email.
That leaves two companies - Equinix, based in Redwood City, Calif., and Prologis, based in San Francisco - with proposals to add three large data centers that could use 249 megawatts of electricity.
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