Two city council committees just passed a data center moratorium in Seattle, making it the biggest jurisdiction in the U.S. to enforce a ban on these projects. According to The Guardian, the moratorium and an accompanying resolution must still go through a full council vote on Tuesday, June 9, 2026, but this is just a formality given the massive support that the data center ban has from the general public.
Several other towns, cities, counties, and areas in the United States have passed data center bans, especially as projects like these have increasingly become unpopular among Americans. Still, many didn’t expect tech-industry heavy Seattle to follow them in their footsteps.
Seattle mayor Katie Wilson first heard about the plan to build five large data centers near the city in April, after the Seattle Times broke the story. “That was the first that I, as the mayor, had heard about this,” Wilson said. “Both I and many of the councilmembers were happy to move toward a moratorium, especially knowing that there was really strong public support out there for that course of action.”
The city intends to spend the one-year hold on data center development to study its impact on the community surrounding it and what the local government should do to ensure that its constituents benefit from the project. This includes putting up pollution standards, determining energy connection requirements, setting contract terms, setting labor standards, and other regulations that will apply to data centers. Wilson also mentioned that Seattle will ascertain if these projects are a “good use of urban land” during this period.
Seattle’s residents supported the temporary moratorium, with more than 50 residents showing their support for it when the city hall opened public comments on the measure. Aside from increasing electricity bills and impacts on the water supply, some of the concerns that were raised at this time included the climate impact of data centers, especially behind-the-meter projects that are often powered by jet engines running on fossil fuels, noise pollution, and the conversion of arable land into sprawling campuses.
The city council’s decision to pass the one-year ban is in stark contrast to the actions of some politicians in other states that support data center developments despite opposition. For example, one Indiana mayor was caught on camera insulting his constituents who were against a proposed data center project in their area, while a Utah senator slapped the phone out of the hand of a reporter who was covering a story about the cases of harassment against his business because of his support for a 40,000-acre site in Box Elder County.
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