Even if they’re headquartered elsewhere in the Seattle area rather than the city proper, Microsoft and Amazon are two colossal tech companies famously pouring umpteen zillion dollars per second into AI compute. Nonetheless, on Tuesday, Seattle passed a one-year ban on large data centers. In April, the Seattle Times reported that the city’s electrical utility, Seattle City Light, was facing a data center problem: four mystery companies were beginning work on five separate large data center projects that would have drawn power from the Seattle grid—sucking up 369 megawatts in a city with only about a gigawatt of capacity. A Seattle City Light representative, Andy Strong, told the Times, “We only have so many engineers. We only have so many project managers,” and added, “It’s going to have an impact.” According to a story last week in the Guardian, the news alarmed Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson, who told that paper, “That was the first that I, as the mayor, had heard about this.” She and the city council reportedly received 10,000 pro-moratorium emails from residents, and “were happy to move toward a moratorium, especially knowing that there was really strong public support out there for that course of action.”