Amazon employees back Seattle pause on new data centers

In short: Seattle City Council will vote on a one-year pause on new large data centers, and some Amazon employees are publicly urging the city to approve it.

What happened

Seattle lawmakers are set to vote Tuesday on an emergency rule that would stop new large data center proposals for one year. This comes about two months after several companies proposed building five large data centers in the city.

Data centers are buildings full of computers that run online services (like giant server rooms that power apps and websites). Across the US, people have protested new data centers because they can use a lot of electricity and water, and they can be noisy.

At recent Seattle City Council hearings, residents spoke mostly in favor of the pause. Some of the speakers were Amazon engineers and other tech workers. One Amazon senior software engineer, Liesl Wigand, said the push to build more AI systems often ignores the resources it requires.

Local reporting cited by The Verge says the five proposed centers could demand up to 369 megawatts of electricity. That is about one-third of Seattle’s average daily electricity use. It would also be about 10 times the power use of the city’s existing 30 data centers.

Supporters also raised concerns about developers hiding behind nondisclosure agreements and shell companies, which can make it hard to identify who is behind a project. Some speakers called for public reporting of electricity and water use, and for requirements to add local renewable energy (like adding new clean power to the grid, not just buying credits).

Why it matters

A one-year pause would give Seattle time to study how these projects could affect electricity bills, water use, land use, and public health. For regular people, the biggest question is whether rapid data center growth will strain local utilities and neighborhoods, or bring benefits that match the costs.

Source: The Verge AI