Amazon drops data centre NDAs and pledges $1 billion to towns
Amazon has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it deals with on data centre projects, and will add more than $1 billion over five years to community programmes in the towns that host its buildings.
Amazon will no longer ask the government agencies it works with on data centre projects to sign nondisclosure agreements, and it is putting more than $1 billion over five years into the communities that host its buildings. The commitments were set out on 2 October by Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, in a post that also defends the pace of the company's construction.
What Amazon is promising on transparency
The switch away from NDAs is one of four areas Amazon lists under a new Data Center Commitment. The company says it holds open houses in the communities where it operates, shares plans as early as possible, and will publish its energy use, energy efficiency, water use, water efficiency and the share of its power drawn from carbon-free sources every year. New sites will use backup generators that meet the EPA's Tier 4 emissions standard, or the equivalent standard outside the United States.
Garman leans on the company's existing figures to argue the industry is cleaner than its critics claim. Amazon reports a 2025 global power usage effectiveness score of 1.14, against an industry average of 1.25 and 1.63 for on-premises enterprise data centres, and says its facilities are seven times more water-efficient than the industry average. It says it was 75 per cent of the way towards being water-positive across its data centres by 2030 as of 2025, and that backup generators sit idle 99.9 per cent of the time.
The post takes on the opposition directly, too. Garman writes that more than 100 data centre moratoriums are being considered across the United States, and argues that slowing the buildout would cost the country its lead in AI. He frames the construction as the largest infrastructure project since the interstate highways, financed by private industry rather than taxpayers.
Where the $1 billion goes
The money sits under a new community framework called Built Together, which Amazon says adds more than $1 billion over five years to spending it already makes in host communities. It is split across three areas.
The first is education and workforce training. Amazon is funding free community college places and estimates it will connect more than 300,000 students over five years, alongside an expansion of its Modular Training Centres. Three operate today, six more are under development and the company plans to build a further 16, with each centre training roughly 2,000 to 4,000 learners a year. Amazon says the centres should prepare up to 100,000 workers annually by the end of 2028.
The second covers energy bills and water. Amazon is offering grants towards heat pumps, HVAC systems, insulation, water heaters, batteries and solar, with a target of cutting monthly bills by 20 to 40 per cent. It aims to upgrade more than 300 schools and community buildings and over 30,000 homes within five years, saving around $700 per household a year. Separately, the company says it has contracted more than 65 water projects that should return over 8 billion gallons a year to local supplies, more than double what its own data centres used in 2025.
The third is flexible funding handed to local nonprofits and community foundations to spend on whatever each area identifies as its priority, from roads and parks to fire department equipment and affordable housing. Amazon says it will report on outcomes annually.
Our opinion
The nondisclosure change is the part of this package that actually bites. Amazon's local deals have been negotiated quietly for years, and a company that now publishes its water and energy numbers annually has handed its critics a set of figures to hold it to. A community fund is discretionary spending that can shrink in a slow quarter; a standing disclosure obligation cannot be walked back without being noticed.
The headline figure also deserves to be read against the size of the buildout it is smoothing the way for. Spread across five years, the pledge works out at roughly $200 million a year, and a large share of it arrives as training programmes and grants. That is genuinely useful to a town short of electricians, but it is not the number that changes the economics for the people already living beside a data hall.