AWS CEO Matt Garman announced on October 2 that the company will no longer sign nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) with the government agencies it partners with on data center projects.
"We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects."
On the same day, AWS also launched a community investment program called Built Together, pledging more than $1 billion over five years, and said it will begin publicly disclosing the energy use, water efficiency, and carbon-free energy share of its data centers every year going forward.
One agreement, a chain reaction
The immediate trigger was in South Bend, Indiana. Eric Horvath, the city's executive director of public works, acknowledged he had signed an NDA with AWS in 2023 covering wastewater treatment services for Amazon's New Carlisle data center campus. Once the agreement became public, environmental groups, taxpayers, and civic organizations raised a common objection: officials negotiating decades-long water and power commitments on the city's behalf were being bound by a corporation's confidentiality clauses.
On September 16, South Bend Mayor James Mueller signed an executive order barring city departments from signing nondisclosure agreements or other confidentiality arrangements related to data centers. Just over two weeks later, AWS announced it would stop the practice across the board.
Local city council member Oliver Davis told reporters the previous approach was "harmful," and that the correction means public money is no longer being handled "behind closed doors" — a step forward, in his view.
Forward only, not backward
The policy has two limits. First, it is not retroactive: AWS's statement applies only to future agreements, and NDAs already signed don't automatically become void. Second, contractors may not be covered: according to reports, in Wharton County, Texas, the nondisclosure agreement was signed through a contractor, and AWS has not made clear whether its new stance extends to arrangements like that.
Microsoft moved earlier. According to reports, Microsoft terminated its existing data center NDAs back in March this year, clearing out old agreements along with new ones. The difference between the two companies comes down to projects that are already under construction or already negotiated.
Local pushback keeps getting more concrete
AWS's move comes against a backdrop of increasingly organized opposition to data centers from local communities across the United States. A WNDU report noted that more than 100 data center moratoriums are currently being debated nationwide. Other estimates say more than 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion were blocked or delayed in the first half of this year, and polling shows about 63% of Americans oppose building a data center in their own community. Electricity prices are the most immediate complaint: according to reports, prices rose 13%, 16%, and 12% in Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio respectively, against a national average increase of about 6%. These figures come from different organizations and the methodologies aren't fully consistent.
Built Together's funding is aimed mainly at a few areas: covering community college tuition for roughly 300,000 students, building 16 new training centers near data centers, funding energy-efficiency retrofits for more than 300 schools and community buildings and over 30,000 homes, and setting aside additional flexible funding for local nonprofits. Garman's framing is that Amazon provides the resources, and communities decide what they need.
Environmental group Stand.Earth isn't convinced, calling the funding "a drop in the bucket" and "crisis PR." At roughly $200 million a year, the pledge works out to about one-thousandth of Amazon's roughly $220 billion in capital expenditure this year.
There's also a gap in the annual energy and water disclosures: the numbers are self-reported by AWS, and the company hasn't said whether they will be independently audited or whether they'll be reported per campus or aggregated company-wide. For counties and cities currently negotiating with AWS, whether next year's report will actually let them look up the water usage of the data center in their own jurisdiction will directly shape how much they trust this pledge.
Sources: WNDU, Implicator, CocoLoop, WSOC-TV. Garman's original statement, the South Bend executive order, and the Built Together funding figures were cross-checked across multiple reports; electricity price increases and the number of opposed projects follow the figures cited by each report's own sources.