Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers.
Garman’s statement was just one sentence in a lengthy blog post in which he sought to refute widespread suspicions about data centers and argue that they are actually beneficial to the community.
NDAs are a key part of the broader data center backlash. For example, environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said that the biggest complaint she hears about data centers is transparency, and that these projects follow a common pattern. “The project was announced after permits had already been secured, the developer never returned phone calls, and local officials signed an NDA before neighbors knew the project was being considered.”
As a result of that backlash, New York City announced a one-year suspension of permits for large data centers, and Garman said more than 100 data centers across the country are currently under consideration.
“If these measures are enacted, the United States will be writing itself a losing ticket in this race, and the effects will last for generations,” Garman argued. “As a country, we cannot afford to be in that position.”
Garman also sought to shatter four big myths about data centers: they use too much water, increase electricity bills, emit vast amounts of pollution, and provide no benefits to local communities.
Citing Amazon’s report on its water usage, Garman said that “direct water consumption in data centers” accounts for only 0.5% of all industrial water use in the United States, “an order of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming, and many other industries.”
Nvidia recently announced that it would reduce “nearly all water usage” within its data centers, but like Amazon’s claims, these claims seem to ignore the broader water usage involved in power generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists also say tech companies must conduct their own investigations into data center water and energy usage, as there are no federal or state requirements on how to report this data.
Regarding electricity prices, Garman said they are only going up in some states with a lot of data centers, and are going down or at least growing more slowly in other states. “If energy prices are going up, it’s primarily because the grid is old and hasn’t been invested in or expanded in advance of the demand,” he argued.
Meanwhile, an independent watchdog recently said data centers were largely responsible for a 76% year-over-year increase in prices on the nation’s largest power grid.
As for the contamination issue that the NAACP is currently litigating over Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI, Garman complained that critics are focusing on the maximum amount of contamination allowed under a data center permit. For example, Amazon’s planned data center in Texas is allowed to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide per year, more than any other power plant in the United States.
“The truth is, the data center generators are barely running,” Garman said. “It is idle 99.9% of the time (it runs about 10 hours a year, mostly due to required maintenance tests).”
Regarding community benefits, Garman wrote, “We no longer use non-disclosure agreements with government agencies with which we collaborate on projects.” He added, “Over the past three years, Amazon has donated more than $1 billion to communities across the United States, and we have a meaningful presence as a data center.”
Will this be enough to quell the community’s suspicions? Probably not. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently argued that the AI backlash is a “fundamentally a crisis of trust” where people assume governments and tech companies are always “coming up with new ways to screw them over.” Similarly, writer Jasmine Sun noted that when data center opponents are presented with tech companies’ arguments, their reaction is usually “incredulity.”
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