Avista Utilities has confirmed that it has entered into an MOU with a company considering a “large-load” data center in Spokane County within Avista's Washington territory. 

Avista Senior Communications Manager Jared Webley said the MOU essentially laid the framework for continuing discussions about the potential project. 

“This is not something we have procured power for on this scale before,” Webley said.  

Agency officials said they were unable to disclose the proposed location of the project due to confidentiality agreements. 

If agreements are made for a data center, the initial energy needs are expected to be about 125 megawatts in 2029 and potentially increase to 500 megawatts by 2032.  

Webley offered a comparison to illustrate the scale of power usage required for such a project. 

“A large, hospital depending on what you’re looking at, could use anywhere from 1 to 5 megawatts of electricity,” Webley said. 

According to the 2025 Annual Avista Report, the company's highest native load last year was 1,837 megawatts on Sept. 2. 

Webley said Avista is proceeding slowly and intends to protect existing customers and plan responsibly for growth. 

“If we do enter into a contract with a large-load customer, it will be structured so that the large-load customer pays for the added costs; things like new power supply, transmission upgrades and any other infrastructure needed specifically to serve them,” Webley said. 

At the moment, he noted a growing number of comments directed at Avista officials regarding large-load customers, such as data centers.   

“We’ve received feedback from many people in the last week about this,” Webley said. “It ranges from supportive to critical of these types of projects and everything in between.” 

Webley noted this is just the exploratory phase to consider the project. 

“While it’s been in the works for many months, there are many months and years ahead of us on this potential project,” Webley said.  

Avista officials are assuring customers that associated costs would not be shifted onto existing customers if a large data-center load comes to the region.  

“When done the right way, large-load customers can actually help by spreading fixed system costs across more usage, which can ease upward pressure on customer rates over time,” a statement from Avista read.  

The Washington Utilities and Transportation Commission will also review the impact on other customers as part of any approval process.  

Avista will need to run engineering studies, required upgrades and install reliability protections before proceeding with the project.  

The Avista statement also pledged not to proceed “unless we are comfortable that any agreement we enter into protects reliability, avoids cost-shifting and makes sense for the communities we serve.” 

Katelyn Scott of Spokane Riverkeeper put together a response from the environmental group about the proposed data center, voicing concerns over publicly available data on facility-level water and energy consumption. 

Scott said there is no general requirement for individual large-load customers to disclose detailed usage data, raising concerns about the cumulative impacts of such a project on shared resources such as the Spokane River and the Spokane Valley-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer. 

Spokane Riverkeeper and partners supported legislation during the latest Washington legislative session that would have required greater transparency from new large-load facilities. 

The bill, which required basic disclosure of water and energy use for such projects, did not pass. 

"Proposals for increasingly large facilities are advancing quickly, and long-term infrastructure decisions are being made before adequate information is available to fully assess their impacts,” the report concluded.