Seattle, Washington, has passed a one-year moratorium on the construction of new data centers, becoming the largest city in the United States to enact such a measure.

The city council voted unanimously in favor of the moratorium on Tuesday.

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A major tech hub whose metro area is home to Amazon and Microsoft, Seattle is the largest US city to have passed such a moratorium as the backlash against AI infrastructure grows across the country.

Lawmakers have framed the pause as an opportunity to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-hungry datacenters being built nationwide to serve the AI sector, and to protect local residents from environmental risks and rising electricity bills.

According to Seattle’s mayor, Katie Wilson, the moratorium will also let city officials determine whether datacenters are a “good use of urban land”, and potentially impose new stipulations on their approval, such as requiring developers to invest in local transit and housing initiatives in exchange for construction permits.

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The push for the moratorium intensified after a report in April claimed that five proposed data centers could potentially consume up to a third of the city’s current electricity demand.

“There are times when public pressure forces elected officials to do something they don’t want to do, but in other cases, public pressure just supports and helps to spur on elected officials to do things that they already want to do,” Wilson said, according to The Guardian.

“I think this was one of those latter cases,” she added.

“Congratulations to @MayorofSeattle and @SeattleCouncil for making Seattle the largest major city to pass a data center moratorium,” Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-WA) commented.

“I have been clear for months that we cannot allow data centers into our cities & towns without very clear regulations and guidelines that protect residents against losing their clean air and water, seeing utility rates go up, with no protections for additional future harms that we don’t even know about. We must protect our communities,” she added.

Gizmodo shared further:

In April, the Seattle Times reported that the city’s electrical utility, Seattle City Light, was facing a data center problem: four mystery companies were beginning work on five separate large data center projects that would have drawn power from the Seattle grid—sucking up 369 megawatts in a city with only about a gigawatt of capacity. A Seattle City Light representative, Andy Strong, told the Times, “We only have so many engineers. We only have so many project managers,” and added, “It’s going to have an impact.”

According to a story last week in the Guardian, the news alarmed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who told that paper, “That was the first that I, as the mayor, had heard about this.” She and the city council reportedly received 10,000 pro-moratorium emails from residents, and “were happy to move toward a moratorium, especially knowing that there was really strong public support out there for that course of action.”

The Guardian also claims that Seattle is the biggest city so far to pass such a measure. According to a site called U.S. Data Center Moratorium Tracker (which, it should be noted, is a project of the hedge fund Interconnected Capital) there have been 111 local data center moratoria, and 77 are currently active.

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