Matt Garman, the CEO of Amazon Web Services, announced that the company has ceased the use of nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in its interactions with government entities while seeking approval for new data center constructions. Garman’s remark was part of a more extensive blog entry aimed at countering prevalent skepticism regarding data centers and advocating for their positive impact on local communities. NDAs have become a focal point in the growing backlash against data centers. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently highlighted that the primary concern she has encountered regarding data centers is the lack of transparency, noting a recurring pattern: “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.” In response to this backlash, New York has implemented a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and Garman indicated that over 100 data center moratoriums are currently under consideration across the United States. “If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations,” Garman asserted. “As a country, we can’t afford to find ourselves in that position.”
Garman also sought to dispel what he described as four major myths surrounding data centers: that they consume excessive amounts of water, that they drive up electricity costs, that they produce significant pollution, and that they fail to deliver benefits to their communities. Citing an Amazon report on its water consumption, Garman stated that “direct data center water consumption” constitutes only 0.5% of all industrial water usage in the United States, “orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries.” Nvidia recently claimed that its new cooling system virtually eliminates “pretty much all water usage” within the data center; however, such assertions—similar to Amazon’s—appear to overlook the broader water consumption associated with electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Experts have also indicated the necessity for independent studies on data centers’ water and energy usage, as there are currently no federal or state mandates governing how technology firms report this data.
Regarding electricity rates, Garman noted that increases have only occurred in certain states with a high concentration of data centers, while rates have either decreased or risen more slowly in others. He contended, “In instances where energy rates are going up, it’s primarily because the grid is old and hasn’t been invested in and expanded before the demand arrived.” Conversely, an independent watchdog recently identified data centers as the primary factor behind a 76% year-over-year price surge on America’s largest electrical grid. Concerning pollution—an issue currently under litigation involving the NAACP and Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI—Garman criticized detractors for focusing on the maximum pollution levels permitted under data center licenses. For instance, a proposed Amazon data center in Texas is authorized to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, surpassing emissions from any other power plant in the United States. “The truth is data center generators almost never run,” Garman explained. “They’re idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing).” As for community benefits, Garman stated, “We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.” Additionally, he mentioned, “Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the U.S. in which we have a meaningful data center presence.”
Whether this will be sufficient to alleviate community concerns remains uncertain. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently contended that the backlash against AI represents “fundamentally a crisis of trust,” where individuals presume that governments and technology companies are perpetually “cooking up some new way to screw them over.” Similarly, writer Jasmine Sun observed that when opponents of data centers are presented with the arguments from tech companies, their typical response is, “I don’t believe them.”
