Amazon Ends NDAs as 100-Plus Data Center Moratoriums Loom

Amazon says it will no longer require county officials to sign nondisclosure agreements before approving its data center projects, a shift the company confirmed in a Friday blog post from CEO Matt Garman, according to WIRED.

What did Amazon announce?

Garman said Amazon is dropping NDAs from its arrangements with local governments and will spend $1 billion over the next five years in communities that host its data centers, WIRED reported. The money is earmarked for free community college programs, workforce training, and energy efficiency upgrades for schools, homes, and community buildings.

Why does it matter for people who live near these projects?

Under the old system, officials who signed NDAs often could not tell residents basic facts about a project headed for their town — sometimes not even which tech company was building it, according to WIRED. In Tucson, Arizona, an NDA kept county officials from identifying Amazon as the tenant of a controversial data center until a public records request from a local outlet exposed the deal; Amazon has since exited that project, WIRED reported. In South Bend, Indiana, where Amazon has put more than $13 billion into a data center campus, local officials have said government employees could not answer residents' questions because of the paperwork, per WIRED.

How many moratoriums are local governments considering?

Garman's post put a number on the political pressure building against the industry. "Right now there are over 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country," he wrote, as quoted by WIRED.

"If these measures are enacted, the US could be writing its own losing ticket to [the AI] race, and the consequences would last generations. As a country, we can't afford to find ourselves in that position."

That warning frames the NDA reversal and the $1 billion pledge as moves meant to head off local bans before they spread further.

What is pushing states and Congress to act on NDAs now?

The New York Times reported in July that secret agreements at multiple levels of government helped shape plans for Hyperion, a large data center project in Louisiana, WIRED noted. Since then, governors in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, and Delaware have issued executive orders cracking down on data center NDAs. Lawmakers in New York, New Jersey, Indiana, and Ohio have introduced bills to ban the practice outright, according to WIRED. In Congress, a bipartisan group introduced the No Secrets for Data Centers Act in the House. Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin, one of the bill's sponsors, sent letters this week to Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle demanding details on their NDA use; Amazon told The Wall Street Journal it had stopped the practice, WIRED reported. Google, Meta, and Oracle did not respond to the Journal's request for comment, per WIRED.

What is an NDA, in plain terms?

A nondisclosure agreement, or NDA, is a signed contract that bars one party from sharing certain information with the public. In data center deals, that has typically meant county officials could not disclose a project's energy use, water use, or even the name of the company behind it — information residents often want before a facility breaks ground near their homes, schools, or water supply.

For now, Amazon's policy change applies to its own future deals. Whether other major cloud providers follow, and whether the roughly 100 moratoriums Garman cited move forward, will shape how fast — and where — the next wave of AI data centers gets built.