Amazon Ends Data Center Secrecy Deals With Local Governments After Months of Backlash

Amazon told local and state officials this week that it will no longer ask them to sign nondisclosure agreements before discussing the company's data center projects, reversing a practice that has drawn mounting criticism from residents, watchdog groups and a congressional investigator as the company races to build the computing capacity behind its artificial intelligence push.

The policy change was announced by Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman in a statement posted to the company's corporate newsroom, alongside a five-year, $1 billion community investment program the company is calling "Built Together." The program is organized around three areas: workforce training for trades such as electrical and HVAC work, grants for energy and water efficiency projects in schools and homes, and flexible funding that local nonprofits can direct toward priorities such as roads, parks or affordable housing.

"We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects," Garman said in the announcement.

The numbers behind the backlash

Amazon's reversal follows two years of rapid data center expansion that has strained local politics in dozens of communities. More than 100 municipal or state moratoriums on new data center construction are currently under consideration across the country, by Amazon's own count, and New York has already enacted a one-year moratorium on permits for large facilities. On the PJM Interconnection, the regional grid serving 13 Mid-Atlantic and Midwest states, wholesale capacity prices rose 76 percent year over year, an increase that state regulators and ratepayer advocates have linked in part to data center demand.

Amazon disputes several of the central complaints driving that opposition. In a separate accounting of its economic footprint, the company says its U.S. data centers draw roughly 0.5 percent of national industrial water consumption, that backup generators sit idle 99.9 percent of the time, and that it has put more than $1 billion into host communities over the past three years. The same filing credits the company with $156 billion invested in American data center infrastructure since 2011, supporting an estimated 37,000 jobs annually and contributing more than $51 billion to gross domestic product. Those figures have not been independently audited.

How a secrecy practice became a liability

Nondisclosure agreements became common in data center site selection because developers wanted to control information about competitors' plans and local governments wanted to lock in projects before rivals could outbid them for the same site. In practice, the agreements have often barred local officials from telling constituents which company was behind a project, how much water or electricity it would consume, or what tax breaks it had been offered, even after ground was broken.

Microsoft was the first major cloud provider to abandon the practice, ending its use of local-government NDAs in March, with the company's infrastructure legal affairs chief, Rima Alaily, saying residents "deserve to know when we are coming to their community." Meta followed in August with a similarly sized $1 billion community fund tied to its own data center buildout. Amazon's move completes a pattern among the three largest cloud operators, though Google and Oracle have made no comparable commitment.

The timing is not coincidental. Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent letters in late September to Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle demanding records on their use of secrecy agreements with public officials, including water and electricity consumption forecasts and whether the agreements were used to block public-records requests. Amazon's announcement came roughly two days after those letters went out.

Local officials and residents weigh the change

The practical effect will be felt first by county commissioners, city councils and utility boards who have signed, or been asked to sign, confidentiality agreements as a condition of landing a project. In Richmond County, North Carolina, local leaders had signed an NDA with Amazon months before the company's own June 2025 announcement of a data center off Airport Road, according to local reporting on the project. Amazon's own materials point to a string of similar deals it portrays as net economic positives: St. Joseph County, Indiana, is projected to collect roughly $3 billion in taxes from an Amazon facility compared with $1.2 million generated by the land's prior use, while Montgomery County, Missouri, anticipates $1.8 billion over 25 years. Separate projects in Madison County, Mississippi, and Newton County, Georgia, are tied to several thousand construction jobs and several hundred permanent positions, by the company's own projections.

Residents near existing and planned sites have organized against the facilities over noise, water use and electricity costs, and those concerns predate Friday's announcement by years. Whether ending NDAs changes the substance of those disputes, rather than simply their visibility, is an open question that several of the people closest to the issue have already raised.

Skepticism persists even as scrutiny grows

Reaction to Microsoft's earlier move, which Amazon's announcement largely mirrors, offers a preview of how this one may be received. When Microsoft ended its use of NDAs in March, the response among critics in communities already hosting its facilities was praise mixed with skepticism. One Wisconsin data center opponent, Blaine Halverson, argued at the time that dropping NDAs does not by itself guarantee proactive disclosure, and Midwest Environmental Advocates noted that "companies typically don't make announcements about building community trust unless those communities are already pushing back pretty hard."

Amazon's announcement has drawn a similar mix of responses, according to reporting published Saturday, which noted that environmental activist Erin Brockovich has said transparency is the single most common complaint she hears from communities near data centers. Amazon's statement was framed explicitly as a rebuttal to what the company called myths about its water use, electricity costs, pollution and community benefit, rather than as a concession that the underlying concerns were justified.

What happens next

Raskin's inquiry remains open, and his letters to Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle sought the underlying agreements themselves, not just company statements about them, along with water and electricity consumption forecasts tied to specific projects. In Wisconsin, state Representative Clint Moses said after Microsoft's earlier reversal that he would keep pushing legislation barring local governments from signing confidentiality agreements at all, arguing that a voluntary corporate policy can be reversed as easily as it was adopted. More than 100 moratorium proposals working their way through town councils and state legislatures are unlikely to be withdrawn on the strength of a press release, and the next test of Amazon's new posture will come the first time a community asks for details the company would once have kept confidential.