Amazon engineers publicly criticized the company’s $200 billion capital expenditure on data centers and AI infrastructure during a Seattle City Council hearing this week. The comments came amid Amazon’s recent layoffs of 30,000 corporate employees over the past eight months. The council voted to impose a yearlong moratorium on local data center construction to allow time for regulating AI infrastructure growth in Seattle, according to fortune.com.
At the Seattle Land Use and Sustainability Committee hearing, Patrick Schloesser, a software engineer at Amazon Web Services, highlighted the contradiction between Amazon’s massive spending on AI infrastructure and its workforce reductions. He noted that Microsoft is also investing heavily, with $190 billion allocated to similar projects. Schloesser and two other Amazon employees advocated for increased regulation of data center development in the city, emphasizing the urgency of controlling rapid infrastructure expansion.
The moratorium reflects growing public concern over the pace and scale of AI-related data center construction in Seattle. Amazon stated it has no plans to build data centers within city limits but remains committed to local investment. The move to pause new projects aligns with broader debates on balancing technological growth with community impact and regulatory oversight, as major tech firms race to expand AI compute capacity.
Seattle City Council’s decision to halt new data center projects for one year aims to provide regulators time to develop policies addressing AI infrastructure expansion. The moratorium follows proposals for five large-scale data center complexes around the city, which triggered public outcry and employee pushback, as detailed by fortune.com.