Amazon の従業員がシアトル市に新データセンターの建設停止を要請

Hayden Field

is The Verge’s senior AI reporter. An AI beat reporter for more than five years, her work has also appeared in CNBC, MIT Technology Review, Wired UK, and other outlets.

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.

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.