Seattle / unanimous / 20 MVA / Digital Realty 380K sqft vested-rights play

Plain-English framing. Seattle's threshold is 20 MVA (megavolt-amperes), which is functionally similar to 20 MW for data center loads — both round to the same 'roughly 20 megawatts of incoming utility service' floor. The moratorium pauses any permit acceptance, processing, or approval at the city level for facilities above that floor. Like Charlotte, Seattle exempts projects with 'substantial expenditures already made' before the effective date, which is the legal hook that Digital Realty's May 29 filing tries to grab. The Digital Realty site is the old Bed Bath & Beyond store at 301 Virginia Street, six blocks south of the Space Needle. The proposed building is six stories: four floors of data center space stacked above ground-floor retail and a couple of floors of office / R&D labs. This is unusual — most modern hyperscale data centers are single-story low-rise on greenfield, not multi-story urban infill — and it suggests Digital Realty is targeting smaller-MW colocation tenants (banks, financial-services firms, latency-sensitive AI inference) rather than hyperscale training workloads. The filing timing is the story. Digital Realty filed on May 29; the moratorium vote was June 4. Five business days. The likely play is to establish 'submitted-permit' status before the freeze, then argue under Washington's vested-rights doctrine (RCW 19.27.095) that the application crystallizes the regulatory rules in effect at submission time, immunizing the project from the moratorium's substantive provisions. Seattle's permit office can still slow-walk processing — the moratorium pauses *approval*, and vested rights protect the rules but not the calendar.

Primary source · KOMO / MLQ Infrastructure / Seattle DCI ↗