The Seattle City Council voted unanimously Tuesday to impose a one-year moratorium on the construction of new datacenters, the largest U.S. city to pass such a pause, according to The Guardian. The city’s metro area is home to Amazon and Microsoft, two of the largest investors in AI infrastructure.
Lawmakers described the moratorium as a chance to draft regulations specifically targeting the electricity-intensive datacenters being built nationwide to support the AI sector and to protect residents from rising electricity bills and environmental risks. Mayor Katie Wilson said the pause 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.
“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. “I think this was one of those latter cases.”
The push for a moratorium accelerated after The Seattle Times reported in April that five proposed datacenters could consume up to a third of Seattle’s current demand for electricity. Lawmakers moved quickly, and local tech workers — including activist groups such as Amazon Employees for Climate Justice — mounted a letter-writing campaign that sent nearly 100,000 emails to lawmakers.
Ben Jones, a spokesperson for the climate-activist group 350 Seattle, said a “huge number” of tech workers organized against the datacenters because AI is “synonymous with people losing their jobs.” He noted that Amazon and Microsoft have laid off thousands of local workers over the past year as they spend a projected $390 billion on AI investments in 2026.
An amendment to the moratorium passed unanimously last week allows existing datacenters in Seattle to apply for expansions requiring up to 20 megawatts of additional power during the year-long pause. Activists expressed concern that the provision could lead to a spike in datacenters’ electricity demand while the moratorium is in effect, undermining the premise of the pause.
Lawmakers justified the amendment as a way to differentiate between datacenters that already exist in Seattle and serve a civic purpose — such as those powering health facilities and emergency-call systems — from large-scale centers designed to serve the AI sector.
Seattle activists are now working with organizations in other parts of Washington state to help more communities mount similar campaigns, including in Spokane, the state’s second-largest city, and Walla Walla, in an agricultural corner of southeastern Washington.
Wilson said her administration will push for state-level regulation of datacenters during the Washington state government’s next legislative session.