AWS drops NDAs with government agencies as data center moratoriums spread

Amazon's one-line policy change

AWS CEO Matt Garman has disclosed that the company no longer signs nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it works with on data center projects. According to TechCrunch, the commitment appeared as a single sentence inside a longer blog post in which Garman pushed back against widespread suspicion of data centers and argued that they are good for the communities around them.

Secrecy agreements have become one of the most contentious pieces of the broader data center backlash. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has described transparency as the most common complaint she hears about these projects, citing a familiar pattern: facilities revealed only after permits are already secured, developers who ignore calls, and local officials bound by NDAs before their neighbors even knew a project was under consideration.

Moratoriums are spreading

That opposition has translated into concrete policy moves. TechCrunch reports that New York has announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and Garman said in the post that more than 100 similar moratoriums are currently being considered across the United States. He framed the stakes in national terms, warning that if those measures are enacted the U.S. risks losing the AI infrastructure race in a way whose "consequences would last generations."

Garman's rebuttals on water, power and pollution

Beyond the NDA pledge, Garman took aim at what he called four myths about data centers: that they use too much water, drive up electricity costs, emit serious pollution, and deliver no community benefits.

On water, he pointed to an Amazon report claiming that direct data center consumption accounts for just 0.5% of industrial water use in the United States, far below golf courses or almond farming. TechCrunch notes the caveat: figures like this, much like Nvidia's recent claim that it is eliminating nearly all water use inside its data centers, leave out the water consumed by electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists have said they need to study data center water and energy usage independently, because no federal or state requirements govern how tech companies report this data.

On electricity, Garman said rates have risen in only some states with heavy data center construction and blamed aging, underinvested grids where increases did occur. An independent watchdog reached a very different conclusion, attributing a 76% year-over-year price increase on America's largest electrical grid mainly to data centers.

On pollution, Garman argued that critics focus on the maximum emissions allowed under permits rather than actual output, noting that backup generators sit idle 99.9% of the time and run roughly ten hours a year, mostly for required maintenance testing. TechCrunch points to the permit for a planned Amazon facility in Texas, which is authorized to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, more than any single power plant in the country. Separately, the NAACP is suing SpaceX and xAI over pollution from their operations.

On community benefits, alongside the NDA commitment, Garman said Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion over the past three years to U.S. communities where it has a meaningful data center presence.

A crisis of trust

Whether any of this shifts public opinion is the open question. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has described the AI backlash as "fundamentally a crisis of trust," in which people assume governments and technology companies are always finding new ways to take advantage of them. Writer Jasmine Sun has made a similar observation about data centers specifically: when opponents are shown the industry's counterarguments, the typical response is simply that they do not believe the companies.

Why it matters

The withdrawal of NDAs is a genuine change in how a hyperscaler approaches local approvals, and it removes one of the most frequently cited grievances in data center disputes. But it lands in a low-trust environment: Amazon's water, power and community figures are self-reported, no regulatory framework exists to verify them, and a 76% grid price increase blamed on data centers gives opponents a number of their own. With New York's moratorium in force and many more under consideration, the pace of AI infrastructure buildout in the U.S. is becoming a political question decided town by town, and voluntary commitments like this one are Amazon's main instrument for keeping projects moving.