KUOW72%
Seattle banned new data centers. Why do companies want them here anyway? 34%
By Joshua McNichols0%
6/18/2026, 11:54:44 PM
BS Summary: This article contains 37 faulty reasoning types, including Appeal to Emotion, Post Hoc (False Cause), and Anchoring Bias, with Negativity Bias as the most egregious example at 18.3% saturation with 312 hits. Analysis detected 2,664 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,706 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 42.1% and a BS Rank of 34% (14,048 of 21,172 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 66.40% of the article peer group.
Seattle has become the biggest U.S. city to pause approval of new data centers.
The City Council passed a one-year moratorium on approval of new and expanding data centers on June 9.
It’s aimed at giving leaders time to study data centers' impacts on electricity, water, and neighborhoods.
The move comes after developers proposed several projects that collectively, if running at their peak load, would have used more than a third of the electricity Seattle uses on a typical day.
The decision is part of a growing national backlash against data centers.
The fight started in rural and suburban communities, where sprawling buildings have drawn criticism over power use, water consumption, and loss of farmland.
Now, those concerns have reached Seattle.
So, why do data center companies want to build inside one of the country’s most expensive cities in the first place?
Hidden in plain site
Many people probably pass data centers every day without realizing it.
Some might occupy a small building in a neighborhood.
Another might occupy several floors in a downtown office tower.
Banks, streaming companies, and other businesses rent space in them to store and process data.
You can see one from Seattle’s Monorail, one door south of Palace Kitchen (or a block south of Top Pot Donuts, if you prefer).
Look for several stories with no windows on top of a ground-floor parking garage.
In total, Seattle has roughly 30 data centers operating within city limits.
The kind of data centers targeted by the new moratorium are medium-sized — bigger than the server room you’d find in many businesses in Seattle.
But much smaller than the giant campuses found in places like Quincy, Washington (those would be illegal, too, but no one’s proposed anything that large in Seattle yet).
The city's temporary ban applies to new and expanding data center facilities larger than 20 megawatts (technically, 20 Megavolt Amperes) — enough electricity to power around 4,000 homes.
Why people are worried
Supporters of the moratorium cite a long list of concerns, including electricity demand, water use, utility rates, heat, noise, and light pollution.
They also question whether data centers are the best use of land in a city, when there’s also a shortage of housing.
But the debate has become about more than infrastructure.
For some activists and elected officials, data centers have become stand-ins for broader concerns about artificial intelligence and the power of large tech companies.
After the Seattle City Council approved the moratorium, members of Washington AI Resistance gathered outside City Hall to celebrate.
“Winning a moratorium on these data centers here in Seattle is only a first step towards stopping the greed machine,” Adrian Reyna Chavoya said through a bullhorn.
“People are rightly alarmed about what AI means for our everyday life ...
People are asking what this is doing to our children, what this is doing to our schools, to our educational institutions, and we've all been witnesses of the layoff of thousands of workers so far.”
The group is calling for more transparency and accountability from technology companies and plans to push for state-level legislation.
According to the environmental group 350 Seattle, nearly 13,000 people sent messages to city leaders supporting restrictions on new data centers.
Their concerns were echoed by some city leaders, and explain why councilmembers voted unanimously to ban new or expanding data centers for a year.
Even Councilmember Bob Kettle, who repeatedly expressed concern about hurting homegrown companies, voted yes.
“ We can come together on the issues that matter, and we can have our disagreements,” said Councilmember Debra Juarez, “but we certainly know when there’s an existential threat ... not only to our city, not only to our state, or our country, but to our world.”
Councilmember Eddie Lin described the moratorium as “only the tip of the iceberg,” suggesting many more AI regulations to come.
Jon Scholes of the Downtown Seattle Association is concerned about this trend, and what it means for the companies driving economic growth in Seattle.
He told KUOW that while he recognizes legitimate concerns around very large data centers in Seattle, “a moratorium on their development seems like a blunt policy instrument that could create unintended consequences,” like the city being unable to attract investment, or existing businesses being unable to access the infrastructure they need to grow.
Why companies want to build in cities
If power and land are cheaper elsewhere, why build in Seattle at all?
One answer is speed.
The closer a data center is to users, the shorter the fiberoptic connections between them.
That reduces delays, or “latency.”
You’ve probably experienced latency if you’ve ever watched a streaming movie stall out as it buffers.
For stock trading companies that do automated trades, tiny delays can mean millions of dollars in losses.
Tiny increases in speed lead to dramatic profits.
The distance to Wall Street is one reason Seattle has far fewer stock traders than New York.
But latency causes problems for businesses here, too.
Online retailers want purchases to happen instantly.
Video game players hate it when they miss a shot because their reaction time was delayed by web traffic.
And with AI tools becoming more widely adopted, even more information is moving across the internet.
You might think, “How bad can latency be, when information travels through fiberoptic cables at the speed of light?”
You’d be right, except that information often doesn’t travel in a straight line of cables between a company and its customers.
Often, it must pass through a single room in an office tower in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood.
If you were to x-ray the ground around the Westin Building (not the Westin Hotel), where that room is located, you’d see an octopus of fiberoptic cables all converging on that spot.
They’d include undersea cables that come ashore north of Seattle.
You’d have to go to a spot near Hillsboro Oregon or to 1 Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles to find a single piece of ground as iconic and important to the internet on the West Coast.
(San Francisco's resources are less centralized at a single location.)
Besides that single room in the Westin, part of the Seattle Internet Exchange, the Westin is also full of rentable servers whose main selling point is proximity to that spinal cord, that Nether Portal of internet traffic.
That's why the data center that's visible from the monorail is where it is.
It's also why a new data center is being proposed at 3rd Avenue and Virginia Street, currently home to a large parking garage near the old Macy's.
Even with the data center moratorium, that project is likely to go forward, for several reasons: It may not exceed the 20 MVA threshold, and it submitted its land use application drawings before the moratorium was passed, meaning it’s “vested” under the old rules, at least as far as Seattle’s Department of Construction and Inspections is concerned.
It's one of several projects whose developers scrambled to get their projects submitted before that deadline.
The SODO data center proposals
Another class of data center projects would give up some of that proximity in order to gain size.
While still not too far from the Westin Building, land is cheaper in Seattle’s industrial districts, including just north and south of the Spokane Street Viaduct leading to the West Seattle Bridge.
It’s an area currently full of produce wholesalers, flooring suppliers, and empty lots where there used to be utilitarian industrial buildings.
Washington state’s largest cement plant is down there.
It was projects in areas like these that set off alarm bells with the city.
Seattle City Light was approached by several developers exploring projects that would require massive amounts of power, including one that would have used enough electricity to power 24,000 homes.
The moratorium halted most of those, including another near the marina in South Park.
But one project likely to go forward — because it, too, submitted land use drawings before the moratorium went into effect — would look like a brutalist apartment building with no windows, nine stories tall, towering over the cloverleaf where commuters leave the bridge to get onto Highway 99.
What happens next?
The moratorium gives the City Council time to study the industry’s impacts and decide what permanent rules should look like.
At the same time, Seattle City Light is exploring a plan to charge new and expanding data centers more for power than residential customers pay.
They’d also pay more upfront for infrastructure improvements to serve their needs.
The goal is for companies to protect residential consumers from shouldering the cost to secure new power sources for power-hungry data center companies.
At a City Council committee meeting on June 17, Seattle City Light's CFO Kirsty Grainger said data centers are only one of many reasons why demand has risen.
"The way that we use electricity is changing.
We've got more electric vehicles on the road every day.
This includes fleets, buses, and we're also seeing more heat pumps in home and businesses," Grainger said.
"So this shift to powering our vehicles with electricity, heating and cooling spaces with electricity, this goes far beyond organic economic growth.
This is a sea change."
Even with the utility’s strategy to make data centers pay more, residential electric bills for ordinary customers are projected to rise an average of 9.5% in 2027 and again in 2028.
After that, bills could rise similar amounts for many years.
At the close of the June 17 meeting, Councilmember Rob Saka asked the assembled experts about those rate increases.
"What if we don't do this?
What's the risk?"
"The biggest risk is we may run out of power," said Leo Lam, chair of a volunteer-run review panel.
"And if we run out of power, we get blackouts."
"I mean, we don't want to be catastrophic," echoed Grainger, "but we are talking about keeping the lights on."
Seattle’s City Council now has a year to find the right balance between welcoming the investment and convenience data centers bring against overwhelming public opposition rooted in concerns about environmental degradation and utility bills.
Hear more stories like this one on Booming, KUOW's economy podcast:
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