Amazon is putting more than $1 billion into the communities hosting its data centers over the next five years, but the number that actually matters in this announcement isn’t the dollar figure. It’s the confirmation buried partway through: Amazon says it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with county officials, a practice that had left local leaders legally barred from telling their own residents basic facts about projects happening in their backyard.
AWS CEO Matt Garman laid out the spending in a blog post Friday, framing it as part of what the company calls its Data Center Commitment, covering education, workforce training and energy affordability in towns from Arizona to Indiana. The timing isn’t coincidental. More than 100 data center construction moratoriums are currently under consideration across the country, and Garman warned that opposition at this scale threatens to cost the US its position in the AI race.
The NDA issue has been Amazon’s most visible problem specifically. In Tucson, residents only learned Amazon was the tenant behind a contentious data center project after a local outlet filed a public records request, since an NDA had prevented county officials from naming the company involved. Amazon has since walked away from that project. In South Bend, Indiana, where Amazon has invested more than $13 billion, some local officials have said government employees couldn’t answer basic resident questions because they’d signed NDAs directly with the company.
Lawmakers have taken notice. Governors in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Delaware have issued executive orders cracking down on these agreements, and a bipartisan group in Congress recently introduced legislation banning the practice outright. Amazon confirmed to the Wall Street Journal that it had already stopped using NDAs. Google, Meta and Oracle, also targeted by congressional inquiry letters this week, didn’t respond to the Journal’s requests for comment.
One gap remains unaddressed, though. Amazon hasn’t clarified whether its promise extends to contractors working on its behalf. In Wharton County, Texas, a local official reportedly signed an NDA not with Amazon directly, but with a contractor managing an Amazon project, and that agreement still blocked him from sharing basic project details with the public.
Garman also pushed back hard on what he called misinformation about data centers’ water and energy impact, and suggested foreign adversaries may be seeding some of the opposition, a claim experts say remains largely unsupported by evidence. Whether communities find that argument convincing may matter less than whether Amazon’s contractors actually stop signing the agreements the company itself just promised to abandon.
