Amazon employees ask Seattle to stop new data centers

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council will vote on whether to impose a year-long ban on new data centers — just two months after several companies proposed building five large-scale centers in the city. Among the moratorium’s staunchest supporters are current employees of the city’s largest tech giant, Amazon, who joined others to testify in support of the policy last week.

Data centers sparked protests Defeat the nation Due to concerns about water consumption, local electricity prices and noise. In Seattle and surrounding King County, the issue has come to a head. If the City Council votes in favor of the moratorium on June 9, any new proposals for large-scale data centers in Seattle will be put on the table for one year, during which legislation could be considered to figuratively (and perhaps literally) restore power.

At two City Council hearings, residents spoke overwhelmingly in favor of the move — including engineers, software developers and other industry insiders. “In my job, I see the consequences of building fully justified AI,” Liesl Wiegand, a senior software engineer at Amazon, testified at a Land Use and Sustainability Commission hearing in Seattle last Wednesday. “The biggest problem is the belief that AI should be the way we solve everything, while ignoring the resources it costs. This culture is everywhere across technology.”

Wiegand is a member of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a group of current and former employees dedicated to the climate crisis. Last year, more than 1,000 Amazon employees signed an agreement Open letter He accused Amazon of “abandoning its climate goals to build artificial intelligence,” calling on the company to power all of its data centers with 100 percent additional local renewable energy. Sarah Tracy, a former Amazon software engineer who is also a member of the group, says they have been waiting for an opportunity like the moratorium to speak out.

Seattle’s new data centers have been proposed by four companies, whose names are still being kept secret, and their combined peak demand would be 369 megawatts — about a third of Seattle’s average electricity use on any given day — and consume 10 times more energy than the city’s 30 existing data centers, each. Seattle Times.

After saying she was proud to live in a city that legally protects employees from employer retaliation when they speak politically, Wiegand pressed lawmakers to take the lead in “setting the terms” for data centers in Seattle. She said she and others in the tech industry have seen examples of data centers that were built responsibly, with protections like climate mitigation and AI safety committees in place. But Seattle doesn’t yet hold tech companies to those kinds of standards. “Let’s not let Big Tech burn Seattle down to win the AI ​​race,” Wiegand said.

The proposed emergency moratorium comes in conjunction with a accuracy Call for more research on the impacts of data centers on city infrastructure, utility rates, water and land use, jobs, and public health. But for some, the plan doesn’t go far enough. One problem, according to… Local news agenciesis that if all the paperwork for a new data center in Seattle is filed before the moratorium is voted on, construction can go ahead anyway.

Patrick Schlosser, a software engineer at Amazon, asked the commission to consider requiring developers not to hide behind nondisclosure agreements and shell companies, which could make it nearly impossible to know who is behind a particular data center. He said each developer must provide 100 percent additional renewable energy to the region’s grid and be taxed every time they lay off workers. He also called for the creation of worker-led safety committees that report to the city, “so that if any AI developed in your facilities becomes a risk to the city, the city can prepare and intervene if necessary.”

In a separate Parks and City Light Commission hearing, Darius Irani, a software engineer at Amazon, called on companies to provide additional energy transmission and storage capacity and provide public reporting on water and electricity use. “We can’t rely on these companies to regulate themselves — Seattle needs to set the terms so that the way any new data centers are built here gets us closer to the future we want,” he said.

Dozens of other people also spoke in favor of the endowment, including electrical engineers and technology workers at other companies, some of whom said they had lost their jobs because of artificial intelligence. One speaker pointed to Seattle’s housing affordability crisis and the notable increase since 2024 in the number of local residents experiencing homelessness. Others talked about data center-related increases in electricity bills in recent years, talked about how many single-family homes a data center in Seattle might replace, and played recordings of data center sounds heard miles away.

Some of the comments echoed a broader backlash against the AI ​​industry. One speaker, who said he worked in AI at a startup, said data centers largely benefit companies, and that when it comes to AI, “I don’t think it’s going to help us much.” Another speaker said that AI “doesn’t need more megawatts, it needs more precision.” (That elicited a “dang!” from the audience.)

Others expressed their disappointment. “If you had asked me a year ago if I supported moratoriums on data centers, I would have said no,” one speaker said. “At the time, technology companies were telling us they planned to power themselves by building massive amounts of renewables — with utility-scale battery storage, and with demand response capacity that would help stabilize the grid. They said they would use closed-loop cooling systems that would limit water use and provide free heating to nearby buildings. But is that what they did? No.”

A former Amazon software engineer who spent years living in Seattle — and requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation — said: Edge That companies are “getting ahead” by building data centers without any input from workers or the communities in which they are building.

“We have a real opportunity here to use the pause,” the former employee said, “to say: OK, if this is the technology that we’re going to live with, how can we really make it so that the infrastructure and the technology itself benefits people rather than just enhancing wealth in the hands of some tech billionaires?”

Despite the scale of the opposition, the moratorium’s supporters may not be powerless. The data center plans were individual Canceled or Its size has been reduced After local protests, a moratorium was proposed at all levels of government. New York State Legislature only They voted for a one-year ban In new large-scale data centers, which have now moved to the governor’s office.

Schlosser cited reports in his testimony that Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital this year, and Microsoft has spent $190 billion, with much of that money allocated to artificial intelligence and data centers. At the same time, Amazon has laid off 30,000 employees in the company’s offices over the past eight months, he said.

“What that tells me is that big tech companies are scrambling to build as much computing power as possible, as quickly as they can,” Schlosser said. “This desperation gives our city leverage.”