Amazon drops data center NDAs as local resistance grows

AWS answers critics on water, power and pollution while a Pennsylvania study documents why communities distrust the promises.

Amazon Web Services has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it works with on data center projects. CEO Matt Garman said so on October 3, TechCrunch reported. "We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects," Garman said. It answers a complaint that has dogged the industry: the deals behind the buildings that power AI get struck in secret.

In a blog post, Garman took on four criticisms: water use, higher electricity costs, pollution, and a lack of community benefits. Amazon has put more than $1 billion into communities with its data centers over three years, he said, according to TechCrunch. The backup generators run about 10 hours a year. Direct data center water consumption comes to 0.5% of U.S. industrial water use.

Transparency is the sharp one. TechCrunch noted that environmental activist Erin Brockovich has named transparency as the main complaint about data centers. The pressure is turning into policy, too. New York has imposed a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centers, according to TechCrunch.

Garman's public defense arrives as the physical sprawl behind AI turns into a local political fight. The industry needs land, water and electricity in specific towns, and the people in those towns are increasingly the ones deciding whether a project goes ahead.

A new study puts numbers and fieldwork behind that resistance. On October 4, Tech Policy Press published a conversation about "The AI Factory: Data Centers, Power, and Resistance in Late Industrial Pennsylvania," a Data & Society report drawn from a year and a half of fieldwork across the state. Tech Policy Press's Justin Hendrix talked it over with Data & Society's Maia Woluchem.

According to Tech Policy Press, the report examines how boosters sell data centers by invoking Pennsylvania's industrial past, pitching the facilities as the next chapter for a region built on steel and coal. It also documents why many communities are not buying the promises made by industry and politicians.

The two developments sketch the same story from both ends. One of the biggest cloud companies is now making its case in public, point by point, while researchers record how little that case moves the places being asked to host it.

Sources

1. Amazon responds to data center backlash, says it no longer uses NDAs · TechCrunch, AI
2. Pennsylvania is a Swing-State Case Study for Data Center Politics · Tech Policy Press