Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman confirmed the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies seeking approval for new data centers.
That single sentence appeared in a longer blog post where Garman attempted to counter widespread suspicion surrounding these facilities. He argued they are beneficial for local communities.
Nondisclosure agreements form a core part of the growing resistance against data centers. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently noted that transparency is the primary complaint she hears. She described a recurring pattern: projects announced only after permits are secured, developers who do not return calls, and local officials who sign NDAs before neighbours know a project is being considered.
That backlash led New York to announce a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centres. Garman stated there are more than 100 similar moratoriums currently under consideration across the United States.
“If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations,” Garman claimed. “As a country, we can’t afford to find ourselves in that position.”
Four myths addressed
Garman attempted to debunk four specific claims surrounding data centres. He argued they do not consume excessive water, they do not raise electricity costs, they do not emit enormous amounts of pollution, and they provide tangible benefits to their communities.
Referring to an internal Amazon report on water usage, Garman said “direct data center water consumption” accounts for 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States. He described this as “orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries.”
Nvidia recently stated it is eliminating “pretty much all water usage” inside a data center. Those claims, like Amazon’s, appear to ignore the broader water usage involved in electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists have also stated they need to study data centres’ water and energy usage independently, noting there are no federal or state requirements around how tech companies report this data.
Regarding electricity rates, Garman said they have only gone up in some states with large numbers of data centres, while they have gone down or 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.”
An independent watchdog recently stated data centres were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America’s largest electrical grid.
On the issue of pollution, which the NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI over, Garman complained that critics focus on the maximum amount of pollution allowed under data centre permits. For example, a planned Amazon data centre in Texas is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is more than any other power plant in the United States.
“The truth is data center generators almost never run,” Garman said. “They’re idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing).”
Community benefits and trust
On the subject of community benefits, Garman wrote, “We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.” He also noted, “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.”
Will this be enough to quell community suspicion? Perhaps not. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the AI backlash is “fundamentally a crisis of trust,” where people assume governments and tech companies are always “cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Similarly, writer Jasmine Sun noted that when data centre opponents are presented with the tech companies’ arguments, their response is usually, “I don’t believe them.”
