Amazon employees push Seattle to halt new data centers
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- Amazon employees including senior software engineer Liesl Wigand and software engineer Patrick Schloesser — both members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice — testified at two Seattle council hearings in support of a one-year moratorium on new data centers ahead of a June 9 vote.
- Five proposed data centers in Seattle from four unnamed companies would demand a combined 369 megawatts — roughly one-third of the city's average daily electricity use — and consume 10 times the power of the city's 30 existing data centers, per The Seattle Times.
- Schloesser cited reports that Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital this year and Microsoft $190 billion, much earmarked for AI and data centers, while Amazon has laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the past eight months — evidence, he said, that "Big Tech is desperate to build as much compute capacity as it can."
- Schloesser and Darius Irani, another Amazon software engineer, proposed conditions any new facility should meet: 100 percent additional renewable energy, public reporting of water and electricity usage, bans on NDAs and shell companies that obscure developers, taxes on layoffs, and worker-led AI safety committees that report to the city.
- The moratorium would also pause a resolution studying data centers' effects on infrastructure, utility rates, water, land use, and public health, but projects with paperwork already submitted could still move forward, per local reporting.
- Last year, more than 1,000 Amazon employees signed an open letter accusing the company of "casting aside its climate goals to build AI" and calling for all data centers to be powered by 100 percent additional local renewable energy.
- New York's state legislature just voted for a one-year ban on new large-scale data centers, which has now passed to the governor's desk, demonstrating the policy is gaining traction at other levels of government.
Why it matters: The hearing reframes the AI buildout fight from abstract climate concern to a municipal power grab: Amazon's own engineers are telling Seattle it has leverage over the company spending $200 billion on AI infrastructure. With a June 9 vote, the moratorium could set a template — Seattle would become the first major U.S. city to pause new data centers, directly affecting how the company's largest home-market workforce deploys capital.
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