Amazon drops NDAs in data center talks with local governments

Amazon said it will no longer use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) while negotiating with local governments over new data centers, following a similar commitment Microsoft made earlier this year. The announcement came inside a longer Amazon blog post arguing that data centers are good for the communities that host them. The move follows a recent spate of data center moratoriums, including one recently enacted in San Francisco.

On a recent episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, reporters Sean O’Kane, Rebecca Bellan, and Anthony Ha discussed whether ending NDAs will blunt that opposition. Bellan was skeptical the moratoriums will have a lasting effect, noting that most last only a year or two, while the data centers themselves are not expected to come online for another two to five years. New York, for instance, has a one-year moratorium on permits for large data center projects, tied to a state environmental review process expected to take a year.

O’Kane argued the backlash largely traces back to the industry’s own poor communication, pointing to a pattern of negotiating data center deals in secret — a tactic he said Uber used extensively in the mid-2010s, including a case near Orlando where the company privately sought tax subsidies to subsidize rides to public transit. “We’ve seen, through a lot of the controversy and backlash to AI and data centers, that the industry just does a really poor job explaining itself,” O’Kane said. He drew a parallel to Tesla, noting that it has been a year since the company set out a mission built around what it calls “sustainable abundance,” later rebranded “amazing abundance” — a framing even Tesla’s own supporters have criticized as vague and undefined, which he called one more example of a tech sector that insists its technology is inevitable without explaining, in concrete terms, how people are supposed to benefit.

Ha pointed to a string of combative social media posts from figures including Trump and investor David Sacks as evidence that data center backers are feeling the pressure from the backlash. He called Amazon’s NDA move a reasonable first step, though one unlikely by itself to win over opponents who, in many cases, still don’t know who would ultimately occupy a proposed site.

Why it matters

Dropping NDAs alone won’t resolve disputes over electricity bills, water use, or property values, but it signals that developers now see transparency — not secrecy — as their best shot at winning over skeptical communities before more moratoriums lock in. How well the industry explains itself from here may matter as much as the policy change itself.