The (d + 1)-dimensional KPZ equation is the canonical model for the growth of rough d-dimensional random surfaces. A deep mathematical understanding of the KPZ equation for d = 1 has been achieved in recent years, and the case d ≥ 3 has also seen some progress. The most physically relevant case of d = 2, however, is not very wellunderstood mathematically, largely due to the renormalization that is required: in the language of renormalization group analysis, the d = 2 case is neither ultraviolet superrenormalizable like the d = 1 case nor infrared superrenormalizable like the d ≥ 3 case. Moreover, unlike in d = 1, the Cole-Hopf transform is not directly usable in d = 2 because solutions to the multiplicative stochastic heat equation are distributions rather than functions. In this article we show the existence of subsequential scaling limits as ε → 0 of Cole-Hopf solutions of the (2 + 1)dimensional KPZ equation with white noise mollified to spatial scale ε and nonlinearity multiplied by the vanishing factor | log ε| − 1 2 . We also show that the scaling limits obtained in this way do not coincide with solutions to the linearized equation, meaning that the nonlinearity has a non-vanishing effect. We thus propose our scaling limit as a notion of KPZ evolution in 2 + 1 dimensions.where ν, λ and D are strictly positive parameters andẆ denotes a standard space-time white noise on the two-dimensional torus T 2 = R 2 /Z 2 . More precisely, we define W to be a cylindrical Wiener process on L 2 (T 2 ) whose covariance operator is the identity, as in [13] or [3], and thenẆ is its (distributional) derivative in time. Thus, formally we have