Amazon Drops Data Center NDAs

A single sentence buried in a lengthy corporate blog post has become the most concrete concession to emerge from Amazon's attempt to answer mounting criticism of its data center buildout. AWS CEO Matt Garman wrote that the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements in its dealings with government agencies, a practice that has become a central complaint among communities asked to host the facilities.

The disclosure arrived alongside a much broader argument. In the post, Garman tried to push back against what he described as four big myths about data centers, and to make the case that the facilities are good for the communities that host them. Whether the NDA line — and the rest of the rebuttal — will change any minds is an open question.

The NDA sentence and its limits

The concession is brief. "We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects," Garman wrote. That is the entirety of what Amazon has said publicly about the change.

According to TechCrunch's reporting, the company did not say when it stopped using the agreements, whether existing NDAs were voided, or how it ensures that local officials can speak freely about projects under consideration. Those details are absent from the post.

The NDA issue sits at the center of the broader data center backlash. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said that the number one complaint she has heard about data centers is transparency, describing a common pattern: "projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don't return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered."

"projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don't return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered."

— Erin Brockovich, environmental activist

That account, reported by TechCrunch, describes secrecy that precedes public awareness of a project. Amazon's statement addresses one piece of that chain — the agreements themselves — without explaining how or when the practice ended.

Moratoriums across the country

The NDA disclosure comes as local governments weigh restrictions on new construction. New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and according to Garman, there are more than 100 data center moratoriums currently being considered across the United States.

Garman framed those measures as a competitive risk. "If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations," he claimed. "As a country, we can't afford to find ourselves in that position."

The comments position the debate as a choice between local control and national competitiveness. They do not address the transparency concerns that have driven the moratorium movement, which Brockovich's account ties directly to the NDA practice Amazon now says it has abandoned.

Water use and the measurement gap

Garman's post also attempts to puncture what he described as four big myths around data centers: that they consume too much water, that they increase electricity costs, that they emit an enormous amount of pollution, and that they don't provide any benefits to their communities.

On water, Garman pointed to an Amazon report about its own water usage and said that "direct data center water consumption" accounts for only 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, which he described as "orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries."

That measurement covers direct consumption inside the facility. Nvidia recently said its new cooling system eliminates "pretty much all water usage" inside the data center, but those claims — like Amazon's — appear to leave out the broader water usage involved in electricity generation and chip manufacturing.

Scientists have 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. Amazon's figures are self-reported and cover a defined slice of total water use.

Electricity rates and a contested finding

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. He argued, "In instances where energy rates are going up, it's primarily because the grid is old and hasn't been invested in and expanded before the demand arrived."

A different account comes from an independent watchdog, which said recently that data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America's largest electrical grid. Garman did not address that finding directly in the blog post.

The two positions rest on different explanations of the same subject matter: one attributes rising rates to grid conditions, the other to data center demand. Without standardized reporting on data center energy use, the two accounts sit side by side rather than resolving into a single picture.

Emissions, permits, and litigation

Pollution is the third area Garman took on. He complained that critics focus on the maximum amount of pollution allowed under data center permits. A planned Amazon data center in Texas, for instance, is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year — more than any other power plant in the United States.

Garman argued that permitted limits do not reflect actual operation. "The truth is data center generators almost never run," he said. "They're idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing)."

The emissions question is also the subject of litigation. The NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk's SpaceX/xAI over the issue, according to TechCrunch's reporting.

Amazon's argument rests on the distance between what permits allow and what generators actually emit. It does not speak to how backup generator testing is conducted across a fleet, or to the combined effect of multiple facilities operating in the same region.

The community benefits claim

The fourth myth Garman addressed concerns community benefits. Here he cited spending: "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."

The figure covers a three-year period. The blog post does not break down how the money was distributed or what portion went to communities directly affected by data center construction.

Garman also published a longer blog post making the broader case for the company's approach, of which the NDA statement is one sentence.

A crisis of trust, not facts

The reception question may not turn on the substance of Amazon's numbers at all. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the AI backlash is "fundamentally a crisis of trust," in which people assume governments and tech companies are always "cooking up some new way to screw them over."

Writer Jasmine Sun noted a related dynamic: when data center opponents are presented with the tech companies' arguments, their response is usually, "I don't believe them."

Amazon's post is framed as a rebuttal to criticism, and the NDA sentence appears alongside arguments that critics have already dismissed. The company's messaging — that data centers are good for communities — relies on data it controls, and independent researchers have said third-party verification is needed.

What the announcement leaves open

Amazon's statement that it no longer uses NDAs is a direct response to one of the loudest complaints from data center opponents. On its face, it addresses a practice that Brockovich described as central to how projects are announced: officials bound to silence before their neighbors know a project is being considered.

What the post does not supply is the operational detail that would make the policy checkable. There is no timeline for when the practice stopped, no account of how many agreements had been in place, and no explanation of how the company verifies that officials can speak freely now.

Those gaps matter because the surrounding claims rely on the same self-reported framework. The water figure, the rate argument, the emissions position, and the community contribution total all come from Amazon. There are no federal or state requirements governing how tech companies report this data, and scientists have called for independent study of data centers' water and energy usage.

For the businesses that run on cloud infrastructure, the outcome of the data center backlash is not an abstraction. Moratoriums that delay construction could affect capacity in some regions, and regulatory friction could add cost or slow the availability of new services. Companies with their own sustainability commitments may face harder questions about the water and energy footprints of the providers they depend on — questions that are difficult to answer when the underlying numbers are unaudited.

For communities, the NDA decision functions as a test. If Amazon follows through and local officials can describe projects before permits are approved, the pattern Brockovich described becomes harder to repeat. If the change is not observable, the gap between what the company says and what residents believe stays where it is. Either way, the debate over water, electricity, and emissions is likely to remain contested until the measurements behind it are produced by someone other than the companies being measured.