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In what labor organizers are calling an unprecedented move, three Amazon $AMZN -2.53% software engineers put their names on the record at a Seattle government hearing Wednesday, pressing city officials to impose rules on the construction of large-scale AI data centers.
The engineers — Liesl Wigand, Patrick Schloesser, and Darius Irani — are all members of Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, a collective of current and former workers that has long pressed the company on environmental and labor issues. At two separate committee hearings that day, the engineers addressed council members; a unanimous vote by the Land Use and Sustainability Committee sent a proposed one-year ban on new large-scale data centers forward, according to CNBC.
Schloesser, who has worked at Amazon Web Services for nearly six years, drew a direct line between the company's capital spending and its workforce reductions. "It's been reported that this year, Amazon is spending $200 billion on capital, with most of it going to data centers and AI," he said, according to CNBC. "Meanwhile, the leaders at my company have laid off 30,000 corporate employees in the last eight months." He called for data centers to be powered by renewable energy, for tech companies to pay new taxes, and for an end to the use of nondisclosure agreements and shell companies when announcing projects.
