Spokane City Council approves yearlong moratorium on new large data centers

No new large data centers can be built or permitted in Spokane for the next year, after an emergency moratorium was approved 6-1 by the Spokane City Council Monday night.

Spokane Councilman Michael Cathcart was the sole vote in opposition, arguing that the moratorium would clumsily ban projects that the city supported, potentially impacting the major aerospace research and development center that has been planned for years.

The move comes weeks after news broke that utility company Avista was approached by a potential 500-megawatt data center - a demand that would be equal to half the combined power used by all residential and business customers in Spokane County. Earlier this month, amid concerns about how a data center mega project could impact the environment and existing ratepayers, Avista announced it was putting negotiations with the potential customer on pause.

It remains unclear who the customer is or what site was being proposed. City officials have speculated that the data center likely wouldn’t be located in city limits, but may well look to the city as a water supplier.

The city’s legal authority to reject a water customer is limited, Mayor Lisa Brown said in an interview.

“The city has a duty to serve, just like Avista has a duty to serve, but also we have certain abilities to talk about what that costs and things like that,” Brown said.

Still, council members hoped a fast-tracked pause on data centers within city limits could establish a framework for future projects before it was too late to regulate them. The yearlong pause will be used to draft permanent regulations during the city’s ongoing code review.

The moratorium was amended ahead of Monday night’s vote to close a “loophole” in the version the Seattle City Council approved earlier this month, which the original moratorium was based on, Councilman Zack Zappone said in social media posts. The original definition focused on facilities or buildings, while Zappone’s amendment refocuses on the type of activity; the change, Zappone argued, would block a data center in a site that has other uses.

The yearlong ban had almost been fast-tracked for a vote last week, but was delayed to Monday amid concerns raised by Zappone and Cathcart that the original language could impact the Spokane Aerospace Tech Hub.

For years now, city officials have lobbied in favor of the tech hub, a consortium of nearly 50 companies, agencies and schools working to make the Inland Northwest a global leader in manufacturing advanced composite materials for use in building lighter aircraft for both commercial and military purposes. That project has faced numerous hiccups, and Cathcart warned that a moratorium could accidentally become another.

Zappone stated Monday that the tech hub was in talks to sublease some of its site to a data center to help offset some of a $20 million funding gap.

For some members of the public, this proposal amounted to a Trojan Horse, slipping a private data center into a larger public project with broad community support.

“We shouldn’t be making any loophole in the moratorium that will allow any sort of data center to be built whatsoever, because we’re talking about whether or not those kids get to have water when they grow up,” said Esther Beiers, a preschool teacher.

For others, the tech hub was itself an affront, arguing it was an unacceptable expansion of the military industrial project.

Many argued that the impact on energy and water consumption, as well as pollution, is an unacceptable risk posed by an expansion of data centers into the region.

Data centers are the largest source of expected load growth in the Pacific Northwest, according to a preliminary report produced by the state Department of Revenue in December.

“Regionally, the Northwest Power and Conservation Council has projected that data centers and chip fabrication could add 2,200 average megawatts of electricity load by 2030,” according to the report. “The power council’s high growth scenario shows these loads increasing to about 4,800 average megawatts by 2030 and 6,500 by 2046.”

This sizable increase in energy consumption can impact ratepayers in numerous ways, including through abandoned assets if large customers exit before investments are paid off, the report adds.

Avista has insisted that the addition of a large-load data center would not affect the energy costs of existing ratepayers.

Water consumption and impacts on local waterways, meanwhile, can be substantial depending on the type of cooling system used and whether heated or polluted coolant is discharged back into the environment, the report continued.

Some also expressed concerns about the potential air pollution associated with large data centers, primarily due to primary fossil-fuel power generation or diesel backup generators. The state Department of Ecology regulates air quality near data centers, most of which are currently located around Quincy and Wenatchee due to the cheap, reliable hydropower in those areas.

“The air pollution from these generators that can harm health comes mostly from tiny particles in diesel exhaust and nitrogen dioxide,” according to the state agency.

However, Quincy-area data centers produce a fraction of the emissions allowable under state law, according to a 2020 Ecology report. Heavy duty trucks, locomotives and agricultural equipment produced 75% of the diesel particle emissions in Quincy, the report added. Nitrogen dioxide levels may spike during “power outages that coincide with unfavorable meteorology” at high enough levels to cause “some short-term temporary respiratory effects among sensitive individuals,” however.

Data centers also produce significant noise pollution, including infrasound, audio with a frequency of less than 20 hertz, that have raised concerns about potential health impacts.

Testifiers argued that the economic and communal benefits from major data centers are nominal or a net negative, particularly for AI data centers. The bulk of jobs created by data centers would be temporary during construction of a facility, and the mass adoption of AI may lead to overall job loss, speakers argued.

Cathcart said that, while he sympathized with the concerns raised by supporters of a moratorium, he believed some of the rhetoric Monday about data centers was hypocritical.

“Put aside AI for a second, just the usage of anything that’s cloud-based, you’re participating in that,” he said, including the Change.org petition calling for a moratorium. “But despite the substantial usage of the tools that are housed in the cloud, there are a great number of unknowns ... and because of those substantial questions, I support a moratorium, but only if we carve out the tech hub.”

Zappone argued that the tech hub wouldn’t be impacted by the language adopted Monday, which only blocks projects that use more than 25 megavolt-amperes.

Amid frequent droughts and wildfires, Councilwoman Sarah Dixit argued that actions like the moratorium are necessary to protect the community’s natural resources.

“I’m the youngest person on council, and I’m the only one who doesn’t have kids,” Dixit said. “And a huge reason for that is because of the state of our climate and the resources that we are losing rapidly.”

“If we want Spokane to be somewhere where we all can live and where future generations can live ... we have to take every step we can to protect our environment, and this moratorium is just one way we can do that,” she added.

An earlier version of this story misstated who initiated the discussion behind the proposed data center.

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This story was originally published June 23, 2026 at 7:09 PM.