Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman said the company has stopped using confidentiality agreements (NDA) in its dealings with government agencies as it seeks approval to build new data centers.
Garman’s statement is just a sentence in a longer blog post in which he attempted to counter widespread suspicion about data centers and argue that they are actually good for communities.
NDAs are an important piece of the broader data center backlash. For example, environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said that The number one complaint you’ve heard about data centers is transparency.and these projects follow a common pattern: “projects announced after permits have already been obtained, developers not returning calls, local officials signing non-disclosure agreements before their neighbors knew a project was being considered.”
As a result of that reaction, New York announced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centersand according to Garman, more than 100 data center moratoriums are currently being considered across the United States.
“If these measures are enacted, the United States could be writing its own losing ticket in this race, and the consequences would last for generations,” Garman said. “As a country, we cannot afford to find ourselves in that position.”
Garman also sought to debunk what he says are four big myths surrounding data centers: that they use too much water, that they increase electricity costs, that they emit a huge amount of pollution, and that they provide no benefit to their communities.
pointing to an Amazon report on its own water useGarman said “direct data center water consumption” only accounts for 0.5% of all industrial water use in the United States, “orders of magnitude less than golf courses, almond farming and many other industries.”
Nvidia recently announced its new cooling system. eliminates “virtually all water use” within the data centerBut those claims, like Amazon’s, appear to ignore the broader use of water involved in electricity generation and chip manufacturing. Scientists have also said need to study data center water and energy use independentlyas there are no federal or state requirements for how technology companies report this data.
As for electricity rates, Garman said they have only increased in some states with a large number of data centers, while they have gone down or at least grown more slowly in others. And he argued: “In cases where energy rates increase, it is mainly because the network is old and has not been invested or expanded before demand arrived.”
On the other hand, an independent watchdog recently said that data centers were the main culprit behind a 76% year-over-year price increase on the largest electric grid in the United States.
When it comes to pollution, a problem that The NAACP is currently suing Elon Musk’s SpaceX/xAI for — Garman complained that critics focus on the maximum amount of contamination allowed under data center permits. For example, A planned data center by Amazon in Texas could release 33 million tons of carbon dioxide. per year, which is more than any other power plant in the United States.
“The truth is, data center generators almost never work,” Garman said. “They are down 99.9% of the time (running approximately 10 hours a year, primarily for required maintenance testing).”
As for community benefits, here’s where Garman wrote: “We no longer use confidentiality agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.” Additionally, he said, “Over the past three years, Amazon has contributed more than $1 billion to communities across the United States where we have a significant data center presence.”
Will this be enough to calm the community’s suspicions? Maybe not: Recently, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that the AI reaction is “fundamentally a crisis of confidence,” where people assume that governments and tech companies are always “coming up with some new way to ruin them.” Similarly, Writer Jasmine Sun noted that when opponents of data centers are presented with the arguments of technology companies, their response is usually: “I don’t believe them.”
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