Amazon has made a series of new public commitments to communities where it’s building data centers, including making an official announcement that it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements in its arrangements with county officials.
In a blog post published Friday, CEO Matt Garman detailed the steps the company says it’s already taking around data centers. In addition to stopping the use of NDAs, Garman says $1 billion will be invested over the next five years in communities that house the company’s data centers. The money will go toward free community college programs, workforce training, and energy efficiency upgrades for schools, homes, and community buildings.
In the post, Garman acknowledged how the fierce backlash against data centers across the country is hampering the AI buildout.
“Right now there are over 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country,” he wrote. “If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to [the AI] race, and the consequences would last generations. As a country, we can’t afford to find ourselves in that position.”
Nondisclosure agreements have become a key point of contention amid the massive data center buildout. Typically, local officials who sign NDAs with data centers looking to develop projects in their area are unable to share information with the public, including the energy and water use of certain projects. Many NDAs bar officials from revealing even basic information—like the tech companies involved in building out the data center. In July, the New York Times reported on how secret agreements at all levels of government were crucial in building out plans for Hyperion, its massive data center in Louisiana.
There has been a rush of recent local legislation attempting to address the secretive paperwork. Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, Massachusetts Gov. Maura Healey, and Delaware Gov. Matt Meyer have all cracked down on data center NDAs in recent executive orders. Multiple states, including New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Ohio, have considered recent legislation banning the practice.
At the federal level, a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently introduced the No Secrets for Data Centers Act in the House. Earlier this week, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), one of the bill’s sponsors sent letters to Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle demanding information on their use of data center NDAs; Amazon told the Wall Street Journal that it was no longer using NDAs. (Google, Meta, and Oracle did not return the Journal’s request for comment.)
Amazon has been at the center of some high-profile controversies around NDAs. In Tucson, Arizona, Amazon was revealed last year to be the tenant of a controversial data center thanks to a public records request from a local outlet; an NDA had been in place barring county officials from sharing the identity of the end tenant. (Amazon has since exited that project.) In South Bend, Indiana, where the company has invested more than $13 billion into a massive data center campus, some elected officials have claimed that local government employees have been unable to answer questions about the project due to signing NDAs with the company.
Thanks to the opaque nature of data center financing and construction, end tenants like Amazon are often not the companies directly interfacing with government officials. As the Houston Chronicle reported last month, a top official in Wharton County, Texas, signed an NDA not with Amazon, but with contractor VisionFirst Advisors, which prevented him from sharing details about the Amazon project.
Amazon did not respond to WIRED’s queries about whether the promises around NDAs also extend to its contractors.
Much of the new blog from Garman is also dedicated to dispelling what he calls “misinformation and outright lies” around data centers and their water use, energy use, the use of diesel generators, and impacts on communities. “This build out is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the U.S. about data centers to trick us into slowing down,” he wrote.
As WIRED has reported, the idea that China is intentionally seeding widespread dissent and misinformation around data centers is a consistent message coming from the White House and tech leaders. Experts, however, say that this narrative is widely overblown, and that there is little evidence of Chinese misinformation driving the data center backlash.
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