So Amazon announced this week that it's done making towns sign NDAs before it'll even tell them what's going into the giant windowless building down the road. CEO Matt Garman put his name on it personally, there's a new $1 billion, five-year community fund called Built Together, and going forward AWS says it'll publish its energy use, water use, and carbon-free percentage once a year for anyone to look at. Open houses instead of gag orders. Very neighborly.
I believe about half of it.
The thing that actually got me paying attention wasn't the press release, it was the backstory out of South Bend, Indiana. An Executive Director of Public Works there admitted, on the record, that he'd signed an NDA with AWS back in 2023 about a data center project. Just two and a half weeks before Amazon's announcement, South Bend's mayor had signed an executive order banning city officials from signing those kinds of agreements at all. Read those two facts next to each other and the timeline tells you more than the blog post does. This wasn't Amazon waking up one morning with a conscience. This was Amazon watching the "we signed something we weren't supposed to sign" story spread to other cities and deciding to get ahead of it before a hundred more public-works directors started explaining themselves to local reporters.
And it's not just one embarrassed city. Garman's own framing leaned on the fact that something like 100 data center moratoriums are being floated by local governments right now. A hundred. That's not a PR problem, that's a trend line, and when you're trying to put a few more gigawatts of compute into the ground every quarter, a trend line like that is existential in a way a bad news cycle isn't. Microsoft apparently did the same NDA reversal earlier this year for its own future projects, which tells me this is less "Amazon had a change of heart" and more "the industry quietly agreed the NDA thing had become a liability."
Here's my actual gripe, and it's a small one: nobody in any of the coverage I read seems to know how far this policy actually reaches. Does "no more NDAs" cover the real estate shell companies and contractors who negotiate the land deals under fake names, which is a whole separate practice that's been going on for years? Some outlets say the policy is about local governments, others say government agencies broadly, and those are not the same thing. If you're going to make a big show of transparency, the scope of the transparency is kind of the whole announcement. Saying "we'll tell you our carbon numbers once a year" while the actual land acquisition still runs through an LLC named after a tree is the kind of gap that makes me roll my eyes at the whole genre of corporate "we hear you" posts.
I'll say the open house idea is genuinely fine, maybe even good. I grew up near a power plant expansion that went through something similar in the 90s, and the meetings were boring and half-attended and still better than nothing, because at least the stuff got written down somewhere a local reporter could ask about it later. Annual water-use disclosure is also a real, checkable number, not vibes, and I'd rather have it than not. Credit where it's due.
But a billion dollars over five years, spread across every market where Amazon is building one of these things, is not actually that much money once you divide it by the number of sites. People pointed out pretty quickly that the tax abatements these projects get from the same towns dwarf the new goodwill fund, and I think that's the number that matters more than the one in the headline. A town gives up a decade of property tax revenue to land one of these facilities, gets a water bill increase and a noise complaint, and now gets a pro-rated slice of a billion dollars and an invitation to an open house. That's the actual trade, dressed up as generosity.
None of this means the backlash is going away. If anything the moratorium count only goes up from here, because the thing driving local anger isn't secrecy, it's the water and the power draw and the noise, and no amount of annual disclosure changes what's actually humming behind the fence. Amazon just made the fence a little more polite.