Amazon says it no longer uses NDAs amid data center backlash

Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers. The statement came in a blog post in which Garman pushed back against widespread suspicion of data centers, arguing they are good for the communities that host them.

NDAs have become a central complaint in the broader backlash against data centers. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said transparency is the top complaint she hears, describing a common pattern: projects announced only after permits are secured, developers who don’t return calls, and local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors even knew a project was under consideration. New York has since announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and Garman said more than 100 similar moratoriums are currently being considered across the United States — a trend he warned could cost the country its competitive position for generations.

Garman also pushed back on four claims he said circulate about data centers: that they consume too much water, raise electricity costs, emit heavy pollution, and provide no local benefit. Citing Amazon’s own water-usage report, he said direct data center water consumption accounts for just 0.5% of industrial water use in the US — far less, he said, than golf courses or almond farming. On electricity, he said rates have risen in some states with heavy data center buildout and fallen or grown more slowly in others, attributing increases mainly to aging grids rather than data center demand; an independent watchdog, however, recently found data centers were the main driver of a 76% year-over-year price increase on the largest US electrical grid.

On pollution — an issue at the center of an NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI — Garman said critics focus on the maximum emissions allowed under permits rather than actual output; a planned Amazon data center in Texas is permitted to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, more than any other US power plant, but he said its backup generators are idle 99.9% of the time, running roughly 10 hours a year, mostly for required maintenance. On community benefits, Garman pointed to the end of NDAs and said Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities with a significant data center presence over the past three years.

Why it matters

Whether this will ease public suspicion is an open question: Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has argued the broader AI backlash is fundamentally a crisis of trust, with people assuming governments and companies are always scheming against them, and writer Jasmine Sun has noted that this skepticism typically boils down to one response: “I don’t believe them.”