Seattle banned new data centers for a year, and the power policy behind it reaches past the city line.

Why Seattle is a market at all

Seattle is an interconnection market first and a capacity market a distant second. The Westin Building Exchange at 2001 Sixth Avenue is the reason. It is a 34 storey tower carrying more than 150 carriers, and it is where trans-Pacific subsea routes meet North American networks. Digital Realty had held half of it since 2006, then bought 49 percent more from Clise Properties in February 2020. Clise kept one percent. The most important interconnection asset in the Pacific Northwest now has effectively one owner.

Our own PeeringDB extract counts 27 interconnection buildings across this metro and 390 distinct networks. Seattle proper holds 12 of those buildings and 303 of the networks. Tukwila holds another 7 buildings. That network density is the actual product here, and it is genuinely scarce on the west coast. It is not something a new campus in a cheaper county can manufacture.

What Seattle is not is a hyperscale build market. The cheap power went east decades ago. Central Washington around Quincy and Moses Lake sits on Columbia River hydro, and Sabey publishes rates under five cents per kilowatt hour at its East Wenatchee campus. That is 150 miles away on a different utility, and we exclude it from this market on purpose. If a broker answers a Seattle search with Quincy inventory, they are answering a different question.

The state does subsidise the sector through tax, and the Seattle metro qualifies. King, Pierce and Snohomish counties fall under Washington's urban data center sales and use tax exemption, created in 2022 for counties above 800,000 people. A colocation tenant qualifies at 150 kW of electrical capacity, which is a low bar for a serious deployment. Two clocks are running against it. No new exemption certificates may be issued on or after 1 July 2028, and certificates are capped at six per year on a first in time basis.

Who is actually plugged in across Seattle and Puget Sound

A building existing and a building being connected are different facts, and only one of them decides whether your traffic can get where it needs to go cheaply. These figures come from PeeringDB, which the network operators themselves maintain, so every row below links to the building's own public entry.

The most connected buildings here

From PeeringDB, which is maintained by the network operators present in these buildings rather than by the landlords, which is what makes it worth more than a directory. Two limits. Entries are voluntary, so a building showing no networks may be single tenant or may simply never have registered. And a network being present says nothing about whether the building has space, power or a price for you: that is still a call.

What has been announced in Seattle and Puget Sound

Announcements are not filings. Nobody has to build what they announce, the figure is the one the developer chose to publish, and the date moves. They are here because megawatts are what a requirement is measured in, and because the size of what is coming changes who will take your call. Every figure below was read on the page it links to.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and each figure links to the report it came from. It is kept apart from the permit record above and never added to it: one is a document a jurisdiction issued, the other is a plan a company published. Neither is availability.

Announced capacity is collected by hand from trade reporting and company statements, and every figure links to the report it came from and was read in that report before it was written down. It is never added to the interconnection count above: one is a plan a company published, the other is a building a network registered itself into. Neither is availability.

Power is the whole story, and right now the answer is no

Seattle City Light is a municipal utility running on hydro. More than 88 percent of what it delivers is hydroelectric, and its wholly owned Skagit and Boundary projects total roughly 1,850 MW of generating capacity. That carbon free profile is exactly why developers came looking in 2025 and 2026. It is also the reason the city said no.

Four companies approached City Light about five large data centers. W.Media put the combined figure plainly: "These proposed facilities would have a combined maximum electricity demand of 369 MW, roughly equivalent to the power consumption of 300,000 homes." That is about a third of what Seattle uses on an average day. Public reaction was immediate and elected officials logged more than 54,000 messages.

The applicants started leaving. One withdrew without being named, and City Light did not identify it. Microsoft and Amazon both said publicly that it was not them. Sabey pulled its 68 MW Tukwila request in late April, saying the project had no clear path forward. Equinix and Prologis stayed in with three projects, two in SoDo and one in Tukwila.

On 9 June 2026 the City Council passed Council Bill 121214 by a three quarters vote, and Mayor Katie Wilson signed it on 11 June as Ordinance 127447. It bars the filing, acceptance, processing or approval of applications to establish or expand data centers above 20 MVA inside Seattle city limits for 365 days, with a possible six month extension. There is one carve out that matters commercially: an existing operating facility may still expand by up to an additional 20 MVA.

The utility policy is separate from the moratorium and it bites harder. City Light's New Large Data Center Load Policy applies to any request for new or expanded service of 10 MVA or more. Those customers lose eligibility for general service rates and move to a new cost based rate class. They sign a service agreement accepting full financial responsibility for the infrastructure for the life of the contract. They enter a queue and receive service only once the necessary power supply and infrastructure are in place, which is not a date. They must also invest in demand response and accept curtailment during peak periods.

Rates are moving in one direction. On 21 July 2026 the Council unanimously approved back to back increases of 9.5 percent for 2027 and 2028, and the same ordinance created the large data center rate class. City Light is separately facing relicensing and reinvestment costs on the Skagit projects. Nothing about the cost of power in this metro is trending your way.

Outside City Light the utilities change and so do the rules, but not in your favour. Bellevue and Redmond are Puget Sound Energy. Everett and most of Snohomish County are Snohomish County PUD, which treats anything over 2.5 MW as a large load and told the Herald in May 2026 that of nine large load customers being served, none were data centers. Snohomish County adopted its own six month data center moratorium for unincorporated areas on 24 June 2026, and Marysville followed in July. Tacoma is Tacoma Power. No jurisdiction in the metro has a published large project under construction.

One statewide point matters if anyone pitches you on site generation. SSB 5982, passed by the Senate in February 2026, widens the Clean Energy Transformation Act so that a nonresidential consumer generating any amount of electricity for its own consumption counts as a market customer. Affected market customers must meet the same clean electricity standards as utilities, with UTC reporting rules and enforcement behind them. Putting gas behind the meter is not an exit from Washington's clean energy law.

Where the market actually is, submarket by submarket

When this market is right, and when it is the wrong choice

Seattle is the right answer when the network is the requirement. If you need trans-Pacific routes, peering with 300 plus networks, low latency to Asia, or a presence in the same building as your carriers, there is no substitute on this coast. It is also the right answer for enterprise edge and disaster recovery footprints sitting near the Amazon and Microsoft orbit, where a few racks to a few hundred kilowatts in an existing energised building is the whole ask.

The tax treatment quietly rewards mid sized tenants. A qualifying tenant needs only 150 kW of electrical capacity to reach the urban county exemption in King, Pierce or Snohomish. That is a realistic threshold for a serious enterprise deployment, and it is worth modelling before you assume the exemption is a hyperscaler perk. Check the date first, because no new certificates issue on or after 1 July 2028, and ESSB 6231 removed replacement server equipment from the exemption effective 1 July 2026. Your first install can qualify while your four year refresh does not.

Seattle is the wrong choice if you need scale on a schedule. Anything requiring 10 MVA or more of new or expanded City Light service goes into a queue with no committed service date, a cost based rate class, full infrastructure cost responsibility and mandatory curtailment. Anything above 20 MVA inside Seattle city limits cannot even be applied for until mid 2027. If your model depends on cheap power, this is also the wrong metro, and Central Washington is the honest answer at roughly a third of the cost.

There is a physical risk that brochure copy never raises. The Seattle Fault runs directly beneath the city, and the Cascadia Subduction Zone sits offshore. The SoDo and Duwamish industrial corridor, which is where nearly every large site is offered, is built on fill over former tidal flats and is mapped as high liquefaction susceptibility. The 2001 Nisqually earthquake produced visible ground cracking and settlement there. Ask for the seismic design basis of the specific building, not the operator's regional resilience narrative.