Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman has publicly responded to the growing data center backlash, confirming that the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers.
Garman’s statement appeared as a single sentence within a longer blog post where he pushed back against widespread suspicion of data centers and argued they genuinely benefit communities. His remarks arrive as opposition to AI server farms intensifies across the United States and Canada.
Why NDAs Sit at the Heart of the Data Center Backlash
NDAs have become a central piece of the broader data center backlash. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said the number one complaint she hears about data centers is transparency, describing a common pattern:
Projects announced only after permits are already secured
Developers who don’t return calls
Local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was even being considered
The pushback has produced concrete policy changes. New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, and according to Garman, more than 100 data center moratoriums are currently being considered 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 claimed. “As a country, we can’t afford to find ourselves in that position.”
Garman Challenges Four Common Data Center Myths
In his blog post, Garman attempted to puncture what he described as four big myths around data centers: that they consume too much water, that they increase electricity costs, that they emit an enormous amount of pollution, and that they provide no benefits to their communities.
Water Usage
Pointing to an Amazon report about its own water usage, Garman said that “direct data center water consumption” accounts for 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.”
However, Nvidia recently said it is eliminating “pretty much all water usage” inside a data center, but those claims — like Amazon’s — appear to ignore the broader water usage involved in electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists have also said they need to study data centers’ water and energy usage independently, since there are no federal or state requirements around how tech companies report this data.
Electricity Costs
On electricity rates, Garman said they have only gone up in some states with large numbers of data centers, while they have gone down or at least grown more slowly in others. He argued that “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.”
An independent watchdog recently offered a different view, saying data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on America’s largest electrical grid.
Pollution and Emissions
When it comes to pollution — an issue the NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI over — Garman complained that critics focus on the maximum amount of pollution allowed under data center permits. For example, a planned Amazon data center in Texas is permitted to release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, which is more than any other power plant in the United States.
“The truth is data center generators almost never run,” Garman said. “They’re idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing).”
Community Benefits
On community benefits, Garman wrote, “We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.” He also said, “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.”
Will Amazon’s Response Quell Community Suspicion?
Whether Amazon’s transparency pledge will be enough to quell community suspicion remains uncertain. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the AI backlash is “fundamentally a crisis of trust,” where people assume governments and tech companies are always “cooking up some new way to screw them over.”
Similarly, writer Jasmine Sun noted that when data center opponents are presented with the tech companies’ arguments, their response is usually, “I don’t believe them.”
The data center backlash reflects a broader tension between the rapid expansion of AI infrastructure and community concerns about transparency, resource use, and local impact. Amazon’s move to end NDAs marks one attempt to address those concerns, though the debate over data centers’ true costs and benefits is far from settled.
What Comes Next for Data Center Development
The outcome of this debate will shape how quickly AI infrastructure can expand across the country. If more moratoriums are enacted, companies like Amazon may face longer approval timelines and stricter community engagement requirements. If transparency improves, some of the trust gap could narrow.
For now, Amazon’s pledge to stop using NDAs is a notable shift. Whether it signals a broader industry change — or simply a tactical response to mounting pressure — will become clearer as more projects move through local approval processes in the months ahead.
