Amazon said this week it will stop using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies during the permitting process for its data centers, a policy reversal aimed at defusing a wave of local opposition to the company's AI infrastructure buildout.
The announcement, detailed in a post from Amazon and first reported by TechCrunch, comes as communities across the country have pushed back on data center projects, citing a lack of transparency as a central complaint. NDAs had been used between Amazon and local government agencies during the approval process, which critics say kept officials from discussing proposed projects with residents until permits were already secured. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich, who has been vocal about data center fights, has called the lack of transparency "the number one complaint," pointing to projects "announced after permits are already secured" by "developers who don't return calls."
A Billion-Dollar Response
Alongside the NDA policy change, Amazon Web Services pledged more than $1 billion in community investments over five years under a program it calls "Built Together," covering workforce training, energy-bill assistance and water projects. The company said it plans to open 25 "Modular Training Centers" by 2028 offering free instruction in trades like electrical work, HVAC and fiber optics, and said grant programs will target more than 300 schools and 30,000 homes for energy-efficiency upgrades. It also pointed to 65 contracted water-replenishment projects it says will return more than 8 billion gallons annually — about double what its data centers used in 2025.
AWS CEO Matt Garman framed the buildout in sweeping terms, comparing the current data center expansion to the construction of the U.S. interstate highway system in the 1950s and describing it as essential to national competitiveness in AI. He also pushed back directly on several of the public's most common objections: that backup diesel generators are a major emissions source — he said they sit idle "99.9% of the time," running roughly 10 hours a year for required testing — and that data centers drive up electricity bills, which he attributed instead to aging grid infrastructure, noting that roughly 70% of the country's power lines are more than 25 years old.
Moratoriums Spreading Nationwide
The backlash Amazon is responding to has become a serious obstacle to the AI industry's infrastructure ambitions. New York has imposed a one-year moratorium on new large data center permits, and Garman said more than 100 similar moratoriums are under consideration in communities around the country — a proliferation that threatens to slow the buildout of computing capacity that Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Meta all say they need to keep pace with AI demand. Garman went further, alleging "widespread reports" that other countries have intentionally spread misinformation about data centers to slow down U.S. AI development, though he did not name specific countries or provide evidence for the claim.
Amazon's pitch is that the economics favor host communities: it cited St. Joseph County, Indiana, where it said a data center project is projected to generate $3 billion in tax revenue compared with $1.2 million generated by the land's prior use. Whether that argument — paired with the end of NDAs and the new community-investment program — is enough to slow the spread of local moratoriums will become clearer as more of Amazon's pending projects, including sites in Montgomery County, Missouri, and Newton County, Georgia, move through local approval processes in the coming months.