Amazon employees ask Seattle to put the brakes on new data centers

On Tuesday, the Seattle City Council will vote on whether to enact a one-year moratorium on new data centers — just two months after several companies proposed building five large-scale centers in the city. Among the moratorium’s fiercest supporters are current employees from the city’s biggest tech giant, Amazon, who joined others to testify in support of the policy last week. Amazon employees ask Seattle to put the brakes on new data centers The tech giant’s employees were among dozens testifying in support of a one-year moratorium on new projects. The tech giant’s employees were among dozens testifying in support of a one-year moratorium on new projects. Data centers have sparked protests across the country over concerns about water consumption, local electricity prices, and noise. In Seattle and the surrounding King County, the issue is coming to a head. If the city council votes in favor of a moratorium on June 9th, any new large-scale data center proposals in Seattle will be tabled for one year, during which it can consider legislation to figuratively (and perhaps literally) take power back. 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 the all-costs-justified AI buildout,” testified Liesl Wigand, an Amazon senior software engineer, at a Seattle Land Use and Sustainability committee hearing last Wednesday. “The biggest issue is a belief that AI should be how we solve everything, while ignoring the resources that it costs. This culture is omnipresent across tech.” Wigand 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 open letter accusing Amazon of “casting aside its climate goals to build AI,” calling for the company to power all its data centers with 100 percent additional, local renewable energy. Sarah Tracy, a former Amazon software engineer who’s also a member of the group, says they’ve been waiting for an opportunity like the moratorium to speak out. The new data centers in Seattle were proposed by four companies, the names of which remain under wraps, and they would have a combined maximum demand of 369 megawatts — about one-third of Seattle’s average electricity use on any given day — and lead to 10 times more power consumption than the city’s existing 30 data centers, per The Seattle Times. After saying she was proud to live in a city that legally protects employees against employer retaliation when they speak out politically, Wigand pressed lawmakers to take initiative in “setting the terms” for data centers in Seattle. She said she and other tech workers had seen examples of data centers built responsibly, with protections like climate mitigation and AI safety committees. But Seattle doesn’t yet hold tech companies to those types of standards. “Let’s not le…