Data Centers in Seattle

Seattle – Pacific Northwest Cloud & Connectivity Hub

Seattle is the premier data center market in the Pacific Northwest, engineered for businesses that require low-latency access to Asia-Pacific markets and direct connectivity to major cloud providers. Its combination of abundant, low-cost renewable energy and a dense network ecosystem provides a strategic advantage for enterprises scaling their cloud, AI, and edge computing workloads. This market is a critical hub for technology, retail, and aerospace industries seeking resilient and cost-effective digital infrastructure.

Seattle: At A Glance

Network & Connectivity Ecosystem

Seattle's connectivity is world-class, serving as a vital interconnection point for traffic between North America and Asia. The market features a rich ecosystem of providers located in carrier-neutral facilities.

Carrier Density & Carrier Neutrality: The Seattle market provides access to over 60 network carriers, as of September 2025. This density ensures competitive pricing and high-performance routing options for any workload.

Direct Cloud On-Ramps: With over 4 dedicated cloud on-ramps and access to 12 cloud regions, Seattle offers excellent private connectivity to major platforms, as of September 2025. Direct access is available to AWS, Microsoft Azure, and IBM Cloud, allowing businesses to establish secure, high-throughput connections that bypass the public internet.

Internet Exchange Points (IXPs): The Seattle Internet Exchange (SIX) is the primary peering point in the region, concentrating a massive volume of traffic from content providers, ISPs, and major enterprises. This robust peering environment lowers transit costs and significantly reduces latency for users throughout the Pacific Northwest.

Bare Metal: Bare metal server options are readily available from multiple providers in the Seattle area. Companies like Hivelocity and phoenixNAP offer dedicated server solutions for performance-sensitive applications requiring direct hardware access.

Power Analysis

Washington's power profile is a key advantage for data center operators, offering some of the most affordable and sustainable energy in North America.

Average Cost Of Power: Industrial electricity rates average $0.048/kWh, as of September 2025. This extremely competitive pricing directly lowers the total cost of ownership for high-density deployments. The grid is sourced primarily from clean hydropower (~67%), a significant benefit for meeting corporate sustainability goals.

Power Grid Reliability: The power grid serving the primary data center corridors in the Seattle metro area is well-engineered and highly reliable. Major facilities are supported by redundant power feeds from multiple substations, ensuring high levels of uptime for mission-critical operations.

Market Access, Business & Tax Climate

Seattle provides a strategic location with a favorable business environment for technology companies and data center tenants.

Proximity To Key Business Districts: Data centers are located with easy access to Seattle's downtown tech hub, home to Amazon, and the Eastside cities of Bellevue and Redmond, headquarters for Microsoft and other major technology firms. This proximity facilitates low-latency connections for corporate IT operations.

Regional Market Reach: From Seattle, digital services can effectively reach the entire Cascadia corridor, including Portland, Oregon, and Vancouver, British Columbia. Its role as a subsea cable landing point makes it an ideal North American hub for reaching markets across Asia-Pacific with minimal delay.

Tax Advantage For Data Centers: Washington offers a significant financial benefit through its sales and use tax exemption on data center equipment. This incentive lowers the upfront capital expenditure required to build out or refresh server, storage, and networking hardware.

Natural Disaster Risk

Seattle has a High natural disaster risk profile, with a FEMA National Risk Index score of 93.22, as of September 2025. While the overall score is high, risks can be effectively mitigated through careful site selection and facility engineering.

The primary environmental threats to data center operations are:

• Earthquake: The region is in a seismically active zone.
• Volcano: Mount Rainier poses a volcanic risk, primarily from ash and lahars (mudflows).
• Wildfire: Seasonal wildfire risk exists in the broader region.
• Landslide: The area's topography makes some locations susceptible to landslides.
• Riverine Flooding: Certain low-lying areas near rivers face flood risk.