Seattle passes moratorium on new data centers amid national backlash

Amid a growing backlash to artificial intelligence, Seattle City Council voted 9-0 on Tuesday to enact a one-year moratorium on new large data centers and study their impact.

Mayor Katie Wilson was quick to support a ban after proposals surfaced in April for five large data center projects in the city. She said she was looking forward to signing the council’s bill.

Seattle would join more than 70 cities and counties around the nation that have temporary or permanent bans on new data centers, including major cities like Denver, New Orleans and Minneapolis, according to a database maintained by hedge fund Interconnected Capital. New York could also become the first state to temporarily ban large data center construction if Gov. Kathy Hochul signs a bill passed by the state legislature last week.

Seattle’s bill would place a one-year freeze on the development of large data centers that use more than 20 megavolt-amperes, roughly equivalent to 20 megawatts, with the option to extend the moratorium another six months. The city council also passed a separate bill Tuesday to analyze how data centers impact Seattle’s electrical grid capacity, water usage, utility rates, land use, local jobs and public health.

“If it doesn’t benefit all of us, we don’t need that technology,” said councilmember Eddie Lin, a sponsor of the moratorium.

Fifty-two people spoke Tuesday afternoon in favor of the moratorium, with zero speaking in defense of data centers.

The reasons for opposition ran the gamut, spanning from environmental concerns around data centers’ consumption of electricity and water to job loss and inequality caused by AI’s impact on the economy.

Councilmembers voiced their own concerns.

“We should not be outsourcing our critical thinking, and we should not be using water so people can use AI to make art, because that’s basically theft,” said councilmember Debora Juarez.

Juarez said she wanted to go further than a temporary moratorium.

“If I could actually do this today, I would do a complete stop of AI and data centers,” Juarez said to cheers from the chamber’s audience.

Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck said the city needed to act before residents were left paying the price for an industry built around enormous power and water demands.

“I believe we have a moral imperative to put the well-being of our residents, our climate, our future above the profit margins of tech billionaires,” Rinck said.

Kshama Sawant, a former city council member running for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives spoke during public comment, illustrating how AI has become a target of populist anger across multiple issues.

“AI is now a central component of genocide and imperialist war, ICE terror, the surveillance state, mass layoffs, and climate crisis,” Sawant said.

Tech industry representatives were absent from public comments in Tuesday’s meeting, but city council members alluded to outreach happening behind the scenes, including invitations from existing data centers in the city to see how the facilities supported cloud infrastructure for essential city services.

In April, The Seattle Times reported that four companies 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. While Seattle has long been home to data centers, the 30 existing facilities are relatively small. City Light said serving that much additional load would make its job of providing power to existing residents more difficult.

Seattle elected officials received tens of thousands of messages raising alarm about the proposed data centers. Several developers have withdrawn their plans for large data centers in Seattle since the controversy emerged.

North of Seattle, Skagit County’s board of commissioners voted to enact a six-month data center moratorium earlier this month.

In February, Washington’s House of Representatives passed a data center bill that would have forced large data centers to cover their own grid costs, disclose energy and water use, and meet clean-energy standards, but it died in the Senate after tech-industry pushback.

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This story was originally published June 9, 2026 at 11:37 PM.