On Tuesday local time, the Seattle City Council will vote on a one-year moratorium on new data center projects. The proposal comes as several companies, including major tech companies including Amazon, submitted plans to build five large data centers in the city just two months ago. Currently, one of the strongest supporters of this moratorium is current employees from Amazon, Seattle’s largest technology company, who attended the hearing with other citizens last week to testify and express support for the proposal.
Across the United States, large-scale data center projects have been triggering protests recently due to issues such as huge water consumption, potential to push up local electricity prices, and equipment operation noise. Seattle and King County, where it is located, are also facing the same controversy. If the city council votes to adopt this moratorium on June 9, applications for new large-scale data center projects in Seattle will be shelved in the next year. The city council plans to use the year to research and develop legislation to "take back power" both figuratively and literally.
At two previous City Council hearings, local residents — including engineers, software developers and others in the tech industry — mostly spoke in support of the moratorium. Lesl Wigand, a senior software engineer at Amazon, said at a hearing of the City Council’s Land Use and Sustainability Committee last Wednesday that he has personally seen the consequences of “unlimited expansion of AI construction” in his own work. She pointed out that there is currently a common concept in the technology industry that all problems should be solved through artificial intelligence, but ignores the huge resource costs behind this process, and this culture is "ubiquitous" in the entire technology industry.
Wigand is also a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an organization composed of current and former Amazon employees who focus on and promote corporate responses to the climate crisis. Last year, more than a thousand Amazon employees signed an open letter accusing the company of "abandoning its stated climate goals" to develop its AI business. In their letter, they call on Amazon to commit to using 100% additional, local renewable energy to power all of its data centers to reduce the impact on the local environment and energy systems.