Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman stated that the company has ceased using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) when working with government agencies as it pursues approval for new data center constructions.
Garman’s comment appears in a longer blog post where he attempts to counter widespread skepticism about data centers and argue that they benefit local communities.
NDAs have become a focal point of the broader backlash against data centers. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich, for example, noted that the top complaint she hears concerns transparency, citing a pattern where projects are announced after permits are secured, developers ignore calls, and local officials sign NDAs before residents learn of the plans.
Due to this pushback, New York imposed a one‑year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and Garman said more than 100 similar moratoriums are under consideration across the United States.
“If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket in this race, and the effects would last generations,” Garman warned. “As a nation, we cannot afford to end up in that situation.”
He also sought to debunk what he described as four major myths about data centers: that they guzzle excessive water, that they raise electricity prices, that they emit massive pollution, and that they provide no community benefits.
Citing an Amazon internal report, Garman claimed that “direct data center water consumption” represents only 0.5% of total U.S. industrial water use, “orders of magnitude less” than golf courses, almond farming, and many other sectors.
Nvidia recently announced that its new cooling system eliminates “virtually all water usage” inside data centers, but such claims—like Amazon’s—often overlook the water embedded in electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists stress the need to study data center water and energy use independently, given the absence of federal or state mandates on how tech firms disclose these figures.
Regarding electricity rates, Garman said they have risen only in some states with many data centers, while they have fallen or grown more slowly elsewhere. He argued that where rates increase, it is mainly because the grid is outdated and lacked prior investment before demand arrived.
Conversely, an independent watchdog recently asserted that data centers were the primary driver behind a 76% year‑over‑year price surge on the nation’s largest electrical grid.
On pollution—a matter currently at the heart of a NAACP lawsuit against Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI—Garman complained that critics fixate on the maximum pollution allowed under data center permits. For instance, a planned Amazon data center in Texas is permitted to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, exceeding any other U.S. power plant.
“The truth is data center generators almost never run,” Garman said. “They sit idle 99.9% of the time (operating roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for mandatory maintenance testing).”
On community benefits, Garman wrote, “We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects,” and added that “Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. where we maintain a meaningful data center presence.”
Will this assuage 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 firms are constantly “cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Likewise, writer Jasmine Sun observed that when data‑center opponents hear tech companies’ arguments, their typical reply is, “I don’t believe them.”