Photo: The Westin Building
Three companies — Prologis, Equinix, and Sabey — are seeking Seattle City Light approval to build four large data centers with a combined peak demand of 369 megawatts, roughly one-third of the city’s average daily power use. Mayor Katie Wilson said Friday the city has not authorized any new facilities and is weighing a moratorium after more than 54,000 residents emailed City Council to support a pause. No permits have been filed; the four projects remain in a “cluster study” phase, an engineering review of whether the grid can deliver the requested load. At full capacity, the facilities would consume nearly ten times as much power as Seattle’s roughly 30 existing data centers combined.
The popular picture — a windowless warehouse on a suburban campus — is not what Seattle has. The city’s existing facilities are overwhelmingly small colocation operations inside downtown office buildings. The Westin Building at 2001 6th Avenue is the region’s primary carrier hotel: a 34-story tower hosting more than 200 telecom and internet providers, with Equinix SE2, DataBank SEA1, Digital Realty, and Colocation Northwest all operating racks across multiple floors. TierPoint runs space at Fisher Plaza in Lower Queen Anne; H5 Data Centers occupies 1000 Denny Way; phoenixNAP operates out of 2020 5th Avenue. These are racks and cages — footprints measured in tens of thousands of square feet, each drawing a few megawatts. The closest hyperscale campus sits just outside city limits: Sabey’s Intergate.Seattle in Tukwila spans more than a million square feet and about 54 megawatts — less than a sixth of what the four proposed Seattle facilities would draw together.
City Light has declined to name addresses, citing nondisclosure agreements, but says all three applicants are looking at the “southernmost part” of its territory — the Duwamish industrial corridor through SoDo, Georgetown, and South Park, where heavy-industrial zoning, large parcels, and substation proximity make siting feasible. The applicants match that geography. Prologis is Seattle’s largest industrial property owner, with 165 buildings and 25 million square feet in the metro area; its Georgetown Crossroads facility at 6050 E. Marginal Way S. is a 590,000-square-foot three-story warehouse — the multistory urban-industrial format that translates readily to a dense-urban data center. Sabey already runs the Tukwila hyperscale campus and has decades of City Light experience. Equinix, a downtown colocation operator for more than twenty years, would be scaling up into an industrial format for the first time in Seattle.
Seattle City Light customers are already absorbing a 5.4 percent rate increase in 2026 — about $4 more per month for a standard residential customer — with further increases projected in the years ahead. The utility faces billions in deferred infrastructure costs, including aging cable replacement and a Skagit River hydropower license renewal, and is absorbing rising load from new housing, EV adoption, and building electrification. Opponents argue adding 370 megawatts of industrial demand would worsen the squeeze on households. City Light is rewriting its contract terms: under the draft policy, any approved data center would have to secure its own power supply outside the city’s existing grid allocation and pay for all infrastructure upgrades at no cost to other ratepayers. “This cannot go back to the ratepayer,” said City Light executive Andy Strong. The revised contracts go to the mayor’s office within weeks.
Council members Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Eddie Lin were independently exploring a moratorium before Wilson’s statement; none has yet been introduced. The mayor and Council will decide whether the new large-load contracts provide sufficient protection, or whether a formal moratorium ordinance is needed. Because no permit applications have been filed, any moratorium would halt proposals still in pre-application — a narrow but meaningful window.
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Wednesday afternoon’s convergence-zone storm dropped hail on South Lake Union, put lightning over Queen Anne, and briefly spun a waterspout three miles west of Magnolia — the first April snow or hail recorded in Seattle since April 17, 1972, by Sea-Tac’s official measure.
The National Weather Service Seattle logged the waterspout at about 3 p.m., describing it as short-lived. Hail and graupel accumulated on rooftops through the afternoon; heavy downpours broke between stretches of blue sky; cloud-to-ground lightning struck above Queen Anne. Over the following 48 hours, the same system carried roughly 18 inches of fresh snow into the Cascades.
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The Seattle City Council unanimously approved two ordinances Tuesday advancing Mayor Katie Wilson’s shelter acceleration plan, directing millions in city funds toward the first 1,000 new shelter units Wilson has pledged to open by year-end. A third bill, expanding tiny house village capacity from 100 to 150 residents — with one pilot village allowed up to 250 — cleared committee Wednesday.
The funding bill redirects money from the city’s affordable housing revolving loan fund and a downtown-restricted human services account toward shelter siting and operations. A separate leasing authority bill grants the Department of Finance and Administrative Services power to sign shelter leases and approve property improvements directly, bypassing a procurement process that city officials said added months to site development timelines.
Council members attached amendments requiring monthly public safety reports from each shelter site, a September progress report on the 4,000-unit goal through 2029, and good-neighbor agreements with surrounding communities.
The first confirmed site in Interbay — a parcel that had been planned for a commercial sports facility before the development was redirected. Individual micro-shelter units measure approximately 70 square feet. Immanuel Community Services will provide case management, mental health care, and substance use treatment. Additional sites are expected to be announced in coming weeks. The city is targeting 500 micro-shelters placed before June.
The King County Regional Homelessness Authority will not oversee any of the new shelter contracts. The city’s Human Services Department will manage them directly — a departure from the regional model governing homeless services since 2021. Mayor Wilson’s office said the approach “make’s more sense for oversight and administration.”
Separately, a $600,000 forensic audit of KCRHA commissioned by the city and King County is nearing completion. The audit covers the authority’s finances from 2021 through July 2025, examining fund use, recurring negative cash positions, and accounting practices. Results are expected this month.
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A new walking and cycling path along the waterfront had its soft launch Friday and will hold its official grand opening Tuesday, April 21. The Elliott Bay Connections greenway runs 11 feet wide along the east side of Alaskan Way between Blanchard and Wall Streets, linking Pier 62 to the Olympic Sculpture Park — a stretch that previously forced cyclists into the active roadway whenever cruise ships blocked the protected bike lane at Pier 66. The trail features diagonal bike signals, water-view benches, and landscaping with reclaimed Puget Sound logs and oyster shells.
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