Last summer, appearing on Theo Von’s supremely popular podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared a vision for the artificial intelligence revolution. “I do guess that a lot of the world gets covered in data centers over time,” said Altman, whose company makes ChatGPT.
It’s probably foolish to take a tech CEO’s comedy podcast ruminations literally. But even if Altman’s prediction is hyperbolic, there is little question that a data center boom is underway.
Data centers—the boxy facilities that house, power, and cool the racks and racks of servers that run our modern internet and technology—are the linchpin of artificial intelligence. A future where AI puts the sum total of human knowledge at every user’s fingertips (and renders obsolete as much human labor as possible), requires many more of them.
A drone view of data centers in Quincy.
Washington is already host to roughly 130 data centers, 10th-highest of any US state. Environmentalists are sounding the alarm that the next generation of larger, more power-hungry data centers needed to power AI could undermine the state’s climate goals and exacerbate drought.
“Climate change was existential before anyone was talking about data centers,” says Emily Johnston, a longtime climate activist and organizer with Troublemakers Community, a group taking on corporate polluters, ICE, and others.
Opponents also warn that electricity prices could soar for Washington’s utility customers, as they have in other parts of the country with data center hubs. Hydropower has helped keep Washington’s electricity costs below the national average, but prices are still rising. Average household electricity costs in Washington state jumped 10.3 percent from 2024 to 2025. Puget Sound Energy has proposed three years of rate increases that will drive up residential electricity prices 30 percent by 2029.
State lawmakers in Olympia are starting to pay attention. Last session, legislators attempted to regulate data centers, protect residents from rising utility costs, and roll back an existing tax break meant to attract their development in Washington.
Power lines lead toward a cluster of data centers in Quincy.
Drawn here by the homegrown tech industry, that inexpensive hydropower, and the state tax break, data centers have been getting built in Washington since the early 2000s. The majority are in rural Central and Eastern Washington where facilities can span hundreds of thousands of square feet and public utilities like Grant County’s have hydropower dams that once produced a glut of cheap electricity.
For small towns like Quincy, data centers have been a financial lifeline. The property tax windfall paid for Quincy’s new high school, new city hall, new police station, new library, and improvements to parks—city officials call it the “Quincy Miracle.”
As of 2023, data centers consumed about 6 percent of electricity in Washington, according to the Electric Power Research Institute. That could grow to 13 percent by 2030. A data center working group convened by Gov. Bob Ferguson last year estimated that data center expansion in the Northwest could require another two to four times Seattle’s current electricity use by 2029.
If those data centers aren’t using clean energy, it will be hard for Washington to meet its climate goals. The state’s climate laws require a carbon-neutral electricity supply by 2030 and 100 percent renewable or zero-carbon by 2045. But the state currently ranks dead last in the US for producing new renewable energy infrastructure like solar and wind.
Washington’s hydropower supply is already maxed out. To keep electricity flowing, utilities must supplement their supply by buying energy on the open market. That often means using fossil fuels like natural gas, according to a Seattle Times investigation. The Grant County Public Utility District recently approved construction of a temporary natural gas plant to help power a data center.
A Quincy-Columbia Basin Irrigation District canal winds past data centers.
Environmentalists also fear that data centers will worsen Washington’s water woes amid increasing drought. A medium-size data center can use about 110 million gallons of water annually, or roughly the water consumption of 1,000 US households to cool its equipment, according to the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. A large data center can use upwards of 1.8 billion gallons annually, the same amount a town of 10,000–50,000 people might use in a year.
Data center supporters say the water fears are overblown and that the facilities typically use less water than big city office buildings, golf courses, and other industrial customers. Part of the challenge is that data centers are not transparent about their energy and water usage so it’s hard to know their true environmental impact, says Zach Baker, policy director with the NW Energy Coalition, a clean energy advocacy group in Seattle.
In its original form, the bill in Olympia would’ve required utility companies to levy tariffs on data centers to ensure they pay the full cost of their consumption and other customers don’t see their rates go up. It would’ve also required new reporting requirements about energy and water usage and required data centers to shut down operations during emergency periods when the grid is strained, such as during heat waves.
The bill was backed by an alliance of conservation groups, climate activists, and tribal nations. Big tech players like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have made public commitments to pay their fair share for data center energy consumption, but lobbyists still argued the bill would create too many technical problems for data centers. The bill also faced opposition from rural elected officials and construction unions whose members build new data centers.
Dan Diorio, vice president of state policy for the Data Center Coalition, says the bill unfairly singled out data centers when other industrial users like semiconductor and battery manufacturers use similar amounts of power in Washington. Diorio says in states such as Georgia, utilities are implementing large load tariffs for all significant power users, not just data centers.
The House passed a scaled-down version of the bill, but the legislation died without getting a vote in the Senate. The legislature did pass a law to partially eliminate the sales tax break data centers can get when purchasing equipment to run their facilities. Though they lost in the 2026 legislative session, environmentalists see this as only the beginning of their fight against AI.
Johnston and other activists are working now to connect with residents in the rural communities surrounded by data centers to build momentum leading into next year’s legislative session when these regulations will likely be back on the table.
“Six years ago, tech companies were doing their best to out-greenwash each other,” says Johnston. “Now, at this moment in time, to choose to pursue a business path that involves massive new uses of fossil fuels is absolutely crazy.”