Amazon Web Services said this week it will stop using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies on data center projects, part of a response to growing community backlash, according to TechCrunch and Yahoo News.
"We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects," AWS chief executive Matt Garman wrote in a blog post, according to TechCrunch.
The announcement followed events in South Bend, Indiana, where city officials discovered that the city's public works director had signed an NDA with Amazon in 2023. The city council voted unanimously in late September to ban NDAs on data center projects, weeks before Garman's announcement, Yahoo News reported.
Environmental activist Erin Brockovich has said the top complaint about data centers involves projects announced after permits are already secured, with officials bound by confidentiality agreements, according to TechCrunch, which reported that more than 100 data center moratoriums are under consideration across the United States and that New York has adopted a one-year moratorium. Amazon also pledged a new program called Built Together, adding more than $1 billion over five years for host communities, including earlier information sharing, local hiring commitments and annual public reporting of energy and water use, Yahoo News reported.
Data centers are the physical bet behind every AI company's growth plan, and that bet now runs into local politics as often as it runs into power contracts. A builder's roadmap that assumes compute keeps scaling on schedule has to account for permitting fights, not just chip supply.