Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has announced that the cloud computing giant has officially stopped using nondisclosure agreements in its dealings with government agencies, a significant policy shift arriving as the company seeks local approvals to build a wave of new data centers across the United States.
The announcement, delivered as a single sentence within a broader corporate blog post, is part of a concerted public relations push by Amazon leadership. Garman is attempting to push back against a wave of widespread public suspicion surrounding data center expansion, striving to make the case that these massive computational hubs are ultimately beneficial to the local communities that host them.
The use of government NDAs has long been a major flashpoint in the broader national backlash against data center development. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently highlighted transparency as the single most common complaint she hears from residents fighting these projects. According to Brockovich, a recurring pattern has alienated local populations: projects are frequently announced only after permits have already been secured, developers routinely fail to return calls from concerned citizens, and local officials have often signed strict NDAs before their neighbors even knew a data center project was under serious consideration.
This growing secrecy and the rapid, unchecked spread of massive infrastructure projects have sparked fierce pushback from local and state governments. Earlier this year, New York State announced a drastic one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers. According to Garman’s own estimates, there are currently more than 100 similar data center moratoriums or restrictive measures being considered by legislative bodies across the United States.
Garman warned that these regulatory hurdles could have severe long-term economic and technological consequences for the country. If these restrictive measures are enacted, he claimed, the United States risks writing its own losing ticket in the global technology race, with consequences that could last for generations. As a nation, he asserted, the country simply cannot afford to find itself in that vulnerable position.
In his extensive blog post, Garman also took direct aim at what he characterized as four major myths plaguing the data center industry: claims that these facilities consume excessive amounts of water, that they drive up local electricity costs, that they emit staggering amounts of environmental pollution, and that they fail to provide any tangible benefits to their surrounding communities.
Addressing concerns over natural resource consumption, Garman pointed to an official Amazon corporate report detailing the company’s water usage. He argued that direct data center water consumption accounts for a mere 0.5% of all industrial water usage throughout the United States, which he described as orders of magnitude less than the water consumed by golf courses, almond farming, and numerous other major industries.
The debate over water consumption, however, extends far beyond direct facility cooling. Nvidia recently claimed that its latest advanced cooling technology eliminates virtually all water usage inside the data center itself. Yet, critics and industry observers note that claims of this nature—including Amazon’s—frequently ignore the massive, indirect water usage associated with the generation of electricity and the highly complex manufacturing of advanced semiconductors. Furthermore, scientific researchers have repeatedly emphasized the urgent need to study data centers’ overall water and energy consumption independently, pointing out that there are currently no federal or state mandates governing how technology companies must report this vital data.
Electricity rates and grid stability have formed another major battleground for public opinion. Garman maintained that consumer electricity rates have only increased in a handful of states with unusually high concentrations of data centers, while rates have actually declined or grown at a much slower pace in other regions. He argued that where energy rates are rising, the primary culprit is an aging electrical grid that suffered from a lack of investment and expansion long before the unprecedented surge in demand arrived.
That perspective contrasts sharply with findings from independent energy watchdogs. Recently, an independent electrical grid monitor reported that data centers were the primary driver behind a staggering 76% year-over-year price increase on America’s largest electrical power grid, exposing deep anxieties among ordinary ratepayers about who will foot the bill for powering the artificial intelligence boom.
Pollution is another highly contentious issue surrounding large-scale computing infrastructure. The NAACP recently filed a lawsuit against Elon Musk’s SpaceX and xAI over the environmental impact of unauthorized or heavily polluting data center backup generators, while tech companies continue to secure massive permits for fossil-fuel-backed operations. For instance, a planned Amazon data center in Texas is officially permitted to release up to 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, a figure that would make it a larger climate polluter than any standard power plant currently operating in the United States.
Garman pushed back against these projections by arguing that critics focus too heavily on the absolute maximum limits allowed under regulatory permits. In reality, he stated, data center backup generators almost never run, remaining idle for 99.9% of their operational lifespan and typically running for only about 10 hours a year, primarily for mandatory maintenance testing.
Turning to the question of community benefits, Garman reiterated Amazon’s policy shift regarding government transparency, confirming that the company no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with the public agencies it collaborates with on infrastructure projects. Additionally, he highlighted corporate financial contributions, noting that over the past three years, Amazon has invested more than $1 billion into communities across the U.S. where the company maintains a meaningful data center presence.
Whether these concessions and corporate PR campaigns will be enough to quell deepening community suspicion remains an open question. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the broader societal backlash against artificial intelligence is fundamentally a crisis of trust, driven by a pervasive public assumption that governments and massive technology companies are constantly scheming behind closed doors. Similarly, writer Jasmine Sun recently observed that when local data center opponents are presented with defensive arguments from tech executives, their standard response is simply a flat rejection: "I don’t believe them."