Amazon Says It Has Stopped Using NDAs as Data Center Backlash Grows
AWS CEO Matt Garman pushes back against what he calls four big myths, but a deeper crisis of trust may be harder to solve
Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has responded to mounting public opposition to data centers, and buried within his lengthy blog post is a notable admission: the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new facilities. The statement amounts to a single sentence, but it addresses one of the most persistent complaints driving the backlash.
Why NDAs Became a Flashpoint
Transparency has emerged as the central grievance in the data center fight. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said the number one complaint she hears about data centers is exactly this issue. She described a recurring 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.”
That frustration has translated into action. New York announced a one year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and according to Garman, more than 100 data center moratoriums are currently being considered across the United States. He frames these measures as a competitive threat. “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.”
Four Myths, According to Amazon
Garman structured much of his post around what he described as four big myths about data centers. The first concerns water consumption. Citing an Amazon report on its own usage, he said “direct data center water consumption” accounts for only 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, which he called “orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries.”
That framing has drawn scrutiny. Nvidia recently claimed its new cooling system eliminates “pretty much all water usage” inside the data center, but such claims, like Amazon’s, appear 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 governing how tech companies report this data.
The second myth concerns electricity rates. Garman said rates have only gone up in some states with large numbers of data centers, while they have gone down or grown more slowly in others. He argued that “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.” An independent watchdog recently reached a different conclusion, identifying data centers as the main culprit behind a 76% year over year price increase on America’s largest electrical grid.
The third myth concerns pollution, an issue the NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI over. Garman 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 countered that “data center generators almost never run” and are “idle 99.9% of the time,” running roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing.
The fourth myth, in Garman’s telling, is that data centers provide no community benefits. Beyond the NDA change, he said Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. where it has a meaningful data center presence over the past three years.
A Crisis of Trust, Not Just Facts
The question is whether any of this will quell community suspicion. The evidence suggests it may not. 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 observed that when data center opponents are presented with the industry’s arguments, their response is usually a flat “I don’t believe them.”
That dynamic helps explain why Amazon’s disclosure about NDAs matters more than its statistics. The numbers can be debated, and they are being debated. Independent researchers lack the data to verify industry claims. Watchdogs and activists point to contradictory findings. But the NDA admission touches something more fundamental: the sense that communities are being asked to accept enormous infrastructure projects without being allowed to see the terms.
Amazon’s change of practice is a concession to that pressure. Whether it is enough to rebuild trust, or merely the first reluctant step, remains to be seen.
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