Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has announced that the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements in its dealings with government agencies, a move that is either a genuine olive branch or a PRBand-Aid applied to a self-inflicted wound, depending on your level of cynicism. Garman's statement was just one sentence buried in a longer blog post in which he attempted to push back against widespread suspicion of data centers and make the case that they're actually good for communities - a thesis that has the same energy as a landlord insisting the rent increase is for your own good.
NDAs are a significant piece of the broader data center backlash. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said the number one complaint she's heard about data centers is transparency, describing a common 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." In other words, the exact plot of every small-town corporate thriller, except the corporation usually wins and the town gets a tax abatement.
As a result of that backlash, New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers. According to Garman, there are more than 100 data center moratoriums currently being considered 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." The "race" in question is presumably against countries that don't have to deal with Erin Brockovich showing up at zoning meetings.
Garman also attempted to puncture what he said are four big myths around data centers: that they consume too much water, that they increase electricity costs, that they emit an enormous amount of pollution, and that they don't provide any benefits to their communities. That's not so much puncturing myths as it is running through the standard corporate denial bingo card in one blog post.
Pointing to an Amazon report about its own water usage, Garman said that "direct data center water consumption" only accounts for 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, "orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries." This is technically true, though it's worth noting that golf courses and almond farming are not currently being proposed at a rate of 100 moratoriums per quarter. Nvidia recently said its new cooling system eliminates "pretty much all water usage" inside the data center, but those claims - like Amazon's - seem 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 around how tech companies report this data. So the current system is essentially: trust us, we're a trillion-dollar company with a blog.
As for electricity rates, Garman said they've only gone up in some states with large numbers of data centers, while they've gone down or at least grown more slowly in others. And 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." That's a bold argument - essentially "the grid is bad, and also we're not going to pay to fix it, but please let us plug in." On the other hand, an independent watchdog said recently data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America's largest electrical grid. One of these claims is peer-reviewed; the other is a blog post.
When it comes to pollution - an issue that 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 center permits. For example, a planned Amazon data center 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. Garman's defense: "The truth is data center generators almost never run. They're idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing)." So the good news is they barely ever emit more carbon than any other power plant in America. The bad news is they're permitted to, and the entire argument for trusting them rests on the honor system.
As for the community benefits, this is where Garman wrote, "We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects." Plus, he said, "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." That's a lot of money, though it's also roughly what Amazon makes in a slow afternoon, and it's unclear how much of it went to actual community benefit versus, say, local lobbying efforts to prevent those 100 moratoriums.
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 center opponents are presented with the tech companies' arguments, their response is usually, "I don't believe them." Which, given the NDAs, the 33-million-ton permits, and the blog-post-based science, is not exactly irrational.