Avista (AVA) just paused a 500-megawatt (MW) data center memorandum of understanding in Spokane County after 5,000 community complaints, a Spokane City Council moratorium proposal, and concerns about ratepayer costs and the Spokane River.
The rumored site is the former Kaiser Aluminum smelter in Mead, actively marketed for data center use with 240MW of Avista power already on site. An energized brownfield, blocked anyway.
Worth zooming out on what this region is:
Eastern Washington runs on cheap Columbia River hydro. By 1950, half of all US aluminum output came from here. Kaiser's Mead smelter and Trentwood rolling mill employed 2,000 workers and supplied Boeing with aerospace sheet. The Mead smelter closed in 2000 after a brutal 2-year lockout. Kaiser's waste practices left a cyanide and fluoride plume in the local aquifer still being remediated today, which explains some of the opposition. (For reference, modern hyperscale data centers use closed-loop cooling systems that bear little resemblance to industrial smelting.)
For this reason, the established Pacific Northwest hyperscale corridor now sits 100 miles west of Spokane in Grant County, served by Grant County Public Utility District (PUD) at roughly $0.02-0.03/kWh hydro power. Microsoft, Google, and Amazon Web Services all built in this region. Avista is a private regulated utility requiring Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission (WUTC) approval on any service agreement of that scale. Grant County PUD is a customer-owned municipal corporation explicitly exempt from WUTC jurisdiction under Washington state statute
Grant County PUD has its own constraints. After raising application fees sharply in early 2025, the large-load queue shrank from ~2,900MW to 692MW, but that's still nearly equal to the PUD's entire average system load of ~750MW across all 55,000 customers. Load caps are in place in Quincy's industrial zone while transmission capacity catches up.
KEEL ($KEEL) has a site in Moses Lake, also in Grant County, 30 miles from Quincy. The company is converting its former Bitcoin mining operation there into 18MW of liquid-cooled AI infrastructure at 190kW/rack, backed by a $128M Vertiv equipment deal. Zoning is approved, a demolition permit was issued March 2026, and full permits are expected mid-to-late summer 2026, ahead of a December 2026 completion target. No Superfund remediation, no water rights dispute to worry about.
When 500MW gets blocked by community revolt in Spokane and load caps constrain Quincy, an already-energized, already-zoned site with active construction permitting in the same hydro corridor carries scarcity value that can compound as the political environment tightens.
Watch for: full permit approval mid-to-late summer 2026, lease execution with a hyperscale or AI tenant, construction completion by end of year.