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Here’s our summary of reasons to maintain a moratorium on data center construction in Federal Way:

  • 💵 Economic - Few jobs, delayed taxes, higher utility rates: where’s the benefit to the rest of the community?
    • Data centers provide very few long term jobs. After a brief surge of temporary construction jobs to finish the initial build phase, the permanent staff required to run a mostly autonomous data center operation afterwards is minimal. 1
    • Data center operators subject cities competing for their business to a race to the bottom for a deal that can include years worth of not paying any taxes. Some of these breaks are even provided at the state level, including here in Washington. 2, 3
    • Data centers take an enormous amount of power to run and often make deals with power utilities for discounted rates. The utility still needs to make money, so data center savings turn into extra costs for the rest of us. Additional infrastructure required to support increased power burdens are also paid for by us, not them. 4
    • What revenue might come from a data center involves real estate taxes, property taxes for the hardware, and the benefits of local employment. They are not related to the fortunes of the companies, for which data centers are simply a needed input to their business model. If the broader business operation succeeds, it would have no impact on data center revenue.1
    • Nobody is coming to town to hang out at a data center. Whatever else could have occupied that site that could draw in visitors is now a lost opportunity.
  • ⚡️ Electrical - They’re power greedy, inconsiderate of the direct effects of their operations on everybody else
    • Data centers are always on, consuming power to run computing and networking hardware as well as the substantial whole-building cooling required to keep the hardware from overheating.
    • New power sources are required to satisfy the projected increasing demand. These are unlikely to be considered, renewable projects - they need to come online fast to meet demand, and fast will mean dirty. 5
    • Some data centers provide their own baseline power by including natural gas-powered jet turbines in their build, bringing power plant-level pollution directly on site, into their neighborhood. 6
    • All data centers include built in on-site backup power sources in order to maintain continuous operations. These are diesel powered, and they need to be tested regularly to ensure they work in an emergency. 7
    • A data center that disconnects from the grid to use backup power can cause a sudden disruption in the energy flow of the whole grid, which could cause a cascading failure across multiple states. New power infrastructure is required to defend against sudden, catastrophic drops like this; who will pay for it? 8
  • 💨 Environmental - They’re an absolute nightmare of a neighbor
    • Data centers require cooling to keep their hardware within safe operating temperatures. How it does so depends on geography and design: it may be cold enough outside to cool the building simply by blowing air through it, or it may have been designed to rely on cold water piped around the hardware to conduct waste heat elsewhere, either to be evaporated or recirculated after air cooling. The choice often comes down to cost. So not every data center will waste or even use water, but some do so, and do so badly. 9
    • In some cases, the amount of water being drawn interferes with the wider pressure required to safely operate the local water system. Drops in pressure may end up with backflow, where dirty water gets drawn into the system from points where it’s only supposed to flow out. The worst steal water beyond what they’re allowed from already distressed supply. 10, 11
    • While some cooling systems are a closed system, cycling the water through to conserve it, others simply dump the heated water back into sewage system, or worse, straight back into the surrounding environment, which cannot cope with the added heat. These bad actors can also overwhelm the system on the other side: the water waste systems weren’t designed to handle this kind of load. 12
    • Data centers are loud. Since they never stop running, they’re always loud, even at night when neighbors are trying to sleep. There are often no solutions for the noise because regulations around it are more about people disturbing the peace, not constant mechanical whining, and the final resolution is that people start to leave the surrounding area. 13
    • Data centers are continually shedding heat, creating heat islands, increasing the ambient air temperature for their neighbors. 14

Take a step back, the picture of data centers today emerges quite clearly: they are parasites, siphoning away from host communities for their own parent corporations’ benefit while delivering novel, ongoing local harms in return. Would a data center even be a viable business if it had to pay to mitigate all of its negative effects?

Research on this topic can be difficult as the powers behind data centers flood out their own talking points to try to counter the incredibly poor reputation they’ve earned. Consider the source.

Finally, we need to consider why this rush to build data centers is so prevalent today. Do we agree with the handful of mind-blowingly wealthy corporate actors that all of this compute is actually necessary to build a better society? Are they perhaps telling us one story while actually looking to dominate the future by owning all of the compute power, regardless of whether their large language model bets pay off?

Do we need to keep playing along with their rigged games where they’re the only winners?