AWS Drops Data Center NDAs as 100+ Moratoriums Loom

Amazon Web Services no longer asks government agencies to sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when it seeks approval for new data centers. AWS CEO Matt Garman disclosed the change in a single line of a longer blog post defending the industry, which faces growing local opposition across the United States.

The line is short, but it addresses one of the main sources of public anger.

Why NDAs matter

Opposition to data centers is not only about water or power bills. Much of it is about secrecy. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said the most common complaint she hears is a lack of transparency. She described a familiar sequence: "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 anger is now turning into policy. New York has announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers. Garman says more than 100 similar moratoriums are under consideration across the US.

He framed the stakes in competitive terms: "If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations. As a country, we can't afford to find ourselves in that position."

Garman's four "myths"

Most of the post goes after what Garman called four myths: that data centers use too much water, push up electricity costs, emit heavy pollution, and give nothing back to their communities. Some of his claims face credible counterpoints.

Water. Citing an Amazon report on its own usage, Garman said "direct data center water consumption" makes up only 0.5% of US industrial water use, "orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries." Nvidia has made a similar point, saying its new cooling system removes "pretty much all water usage" inside the facility. Both claims leave out the water used to generate electricity and manufacture chips. Scientists also say this data needs independent study, because no federal or state rules govern how tech companies report it.

Electricity prices. Garman acknowledged that rates have risen in some states with many data centers, but said they have fallen or grown more slowly elsewhere. Where prices are climbing, he blamed an old grid that "hasn't been invested in and expanded before the demand arrived." An independent watchdog disagrees. It recently identified data centers as the main driver of a 76% year-over-year price increase on America's largest electrical grid.

Pollution. The NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk's SpaceX/xAI over this issue. Garman argued that critics focus on the maximum emissions allowed by permits rather than actual output. One example: a planned Amazon data center in Texas is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, more than any power plant in the country. Garman's response: "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)."

Community benefits. The NDA announcement appears in this section, next to a dollar figure. Garman said Amazon has given more than $1 billion over three years to US communities where it has a meaningful data center presence.

The Bigger Picture

Dropping NDAs is the most concrete item in Garman's post. Unlike the other points, it changes how Amazon actually behaves. The rest is argument, and several of those arguments rely on Amazon's own reporting at a time when no standard disclosure rules exist. Self-reported figures are unlikely to persuade people whose main complaint is that they were kept uninformed.

Trust is the core issue. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently described the AI backlash as "fundamentally a crisis of trust," in which people assume governments and tech companies are "cooking up some new way to screw them over." Writer Jasmine Sun has observed that when opponents hear the industry's case, their typical reaction is, "I don't believe them."

This suggests that openness at the permitting stage may do more for Amazon than any statistic. Public scrutiny of how communities benefit from these projects is also growing, including attention to Meta's data center tax credit.

Several things are worth watching:

Whether Microsoft, Google, Meta and others drop NDAs as well.
Whether any of the 100-plus proposed moratoriums become law.
Whether states start requiring independent reporting of water and energy use.

That last step would replace corporate claims with figures that critics might actually accept.