A small data center is proposed for the ground floor of the Starbucks Center in Seattle's SoDo district, according to the Seattle Times' coverage of permit records first reported by the Daily Journal of Commerce. The 45,600-square-foot facility would occupy space at 2401 Utah Ave. S. that housed an Amazon Fresh pickup location until it closed in January 2024. The plan would not touch Starbucks' offices on the floors above.
The timing is the story. On June 9, 2026, the Seattle City Council unanimously passed a one-year moratorium on new large data centers, defined as facilities drawing more than 20 megavolt-amperes, roughly 20 megawatts. The pause can be extended another six months. The Starbucks Center proposal sits under that line, so it moves forward while larger projects in the city are frozen.
A hard megawatt cap does not stop compute from entering a city. It changes the shape of what gets built. A 45,600-square-foot floor plate held under 20 MVA pencils out to a modest power density, the kind of load a retrofit into an existing commercial building can carry without a new substation or a greenfield campus. That is precisely the profile that slips through a threshold written to catch hyperscale.
For cooling, the constraints flip. A landmarked former Sears building was never designed for rack heat rejection. Floor-to-floor heights, structural loading, and the absence of dedicated cooling infrastructure push these urban retrofits toward air-cooled or modest liquid-assist designs rather than the high-density liquid architectures going into purpose-built halls. The same tension between power caps and physical limits is showing up in jurisdictions from Utah to Illinois, where the regulatory framing increasingly shapes the cooling spec.
A 20 MW data center inside a dense urban core still needs to reject its heat somewhere. Evaporative cooling draws municipal water, a non-starter for a downtown building tied to city water and sewer at commercial rates. That math nudges small urban facilities toward closed-loop or air-cooled approaches, the same calculus driving operators elsewhere to chase zero-water cooling pilots and reconsider the water-versus-power tradeoff.
The Seattle moratorium will steer developers toward exactly this size class for the next 12 to 18 months. Expect more sub-20 MVA proposals tucked into existing retail and warehouse space, each one a small thermal load distributed across the urban grid rather than a single concentrated campus. For cooling vendors, the addressable market shifts toward compact, building-integrated heat rejection and away from the megawatt-scale chiller plants that define the hyperscale buildout. The cap was written to slow data centers. It may instead reshape what a city data center looks like, and how it stays cool.