Regarding A.I. in Lakewood/Pierce County

During the Sep21 Council meeting, City Councilmember Michael Brandstetter asked Michael Catsi, President and CEO of the Economic Development Board for Tacoma \ Pierce County, a question about the feasibility of A.I. centers appearing in Lakewood and Pierce County.

MB; “…One of the questions that I get from people in Lakewood that…

want to know what I know, which often isn't a lot, was uh what's the potential

for these artificial intelligence data centers? Are there any of them

in considering trying to… invest and position locate themselves in Pierce County.”

MC; “Yeah. So, that's… that's an interesting question. Um before starting at EDB, I was with Tacoma Public Utilities and

we're on the power side. I was their Economic Development Manager there and we have some of the lowest rates in the country. So we

were getting a lot of questions at that time from hyperscalers, the larger AI data centers that we're starting to

see now. It wasn't as common back then but they were they were smaller but not that much smaller. The problem they

have here is that anything anything requiring over 10 megawatts you start going into market rate situations as

opposed to BPA Tier One prices and it tends to become uneconomical there. There's a big

difference between BPA Tier One prices per megawatt than market value.

So power is because it's such a big part of the their operations that they need power at the right price. It's very hard

for them to get that where we are. We also don't have the infrastructure to support them. What we do have is the

ability to to support more of the what we call ‘edge’ or urban data centers.

Those smaller data centers under 10 megawatts that are really focused on supporting business efforts and

things. You know, Multicare has a data center, AT&T has a data center in Pierce C...

you know, there are those sort of small data centers that actually help operate the businesses that are here. So, we

have capacity. I just spoke with Tacoma Power recently and they have a capacity for small data centers. I'm not

sure you're going to get small AI data centers. They tend to need much bigger projects, but the urban and

and the edge data centers are really critical to sort of the local economy. But no, we're not going to get hyperscalers here in Pierce County.”

(edit for brevity)
(thx to City Manager Doug Russell for isolating this clip)