Amazon Addresses Data Center Backlash and Says It Has Dropped NDAs

Meta Description: Amazon Web Services stops using NDAs with government agencies as data center backlash spreads, citing water, power, pollution and community concerns.

Tags: Amazon Web Services, data centers, AI infrastructure, permit backlash, energy


Amazon Web Services Drops NDAs as 100 Data Center Moratoriums Spread

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers. The statement appeared in a longer blog post, and it sits at the center of a widening data center backlash in the United States.

Background: Transparency Concerns Came First

Community opposition has not built around a single issue. NDAs are a significant piece of that broader backlash. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said the number one complaint she has heard about data centers is transparency. She described a familiar sequence: projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who do not return calls, and local officials who signed NDAs before neighbors knew a project was being considered.

That pattern fed suspicion that the public is kept out of decisions affecting land, power, water and taxes. New York has responded with a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers. According to Garman, more than 100 data center moratoriums are currently being considered across the United States.

Development: Amazon’s Four Myths and the Numbers

Garman used the blog post to push back against what he called four big myths around data centers: that they consume too much water, increase electricity costs, emit an enormous amount of pollution, and do not provide benefits to their communities.

On water, he pointed to an Amazon report about the company's own water usage. He said "direct data center water consumption" accounts for 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming and many other industries. Nvidia recently said it is eliminating "pretty much all water usage" inside a data center. But those claims, like Amazon's, seem to ignore the broader water usage involved in electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists have also said they need to study data centers' water and energy usage independently, since there are no federal or state requirements around how tech companies report this data.

On electricity, Garman said rates have only gone up in some states with large numbers of data centers, while they have gone down or at least grown more slowly in others. In cases where rates rise, he argued, it is primarily because the grid is old and has not been invested in and expanded before the demand arrived. That claim meets a sharper count: an independent watchdog recently said data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America's largest electrical grid.

On pollution, Garman complained that critics focus on the maximum amount of pollution allowed under data center permits. A planned Amazon data center in Texas is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is more than any other power plant in the United States. "The truth is data center generators almost never run," Garman said. "They're idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing)." The pollution debate also extends beyond Amazon: the NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk's SpaceX/xAI over the issue.

Latest: One-Sentence NDA Pledge and $1 Billion Claim

The NDA change was just one sentence in Garman's longer blog post, which tried to push back against widespread suspicion of data centers and make the case that they are actually good for communities. "We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects," he wrote. He also said, "Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. in which we have a meaningful data center presence."

Garman's warning on regulation was explicit. "If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations," Garman claimed. "As a country, we can't afford to find ourselves in that position."

Current Stage: Trust Still Faces the Permitting Clock

Whether the package will quell community suspicion is uncertain. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the AI backlash is "fundamentally a crisis of trust," where people assume governments and tech companies are always "cooking up some new way to screw them over." Writer Jasmine Sun noted that when data center opponents are presented with the tech companies' arguments, their response is usually, "I don't believe them."

The next test may be whether dropping NDAs and citing community spending can make permitting processes feel less closed, while independent reporting standards for water and energy use remain absent.