AWS chief Matt Garman says the company no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with public bodies, as he rebuts what he calls myths about data centers amid rising local opposition and proposed moratoriums across the United States.
Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman has said the company has stopped using nondisclosure agreements in its dealings with government agencies when seeking approval for new data centers. The remark was a single line in a longer blog post defending the facilities against growing public suspicion and arguing that they benefit the communities that host them.
Backlash over secrecy
Confidentiality agreements have become a flashpoint in the wider resistance to data centers. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said transparency is the most common complaint she hears, describing projects announced after permits are secured and local officials who signed NDAs before residents knew anything was planned.
The opposition is turning into policy. New York has announced a one-year pause on permits for large data centers, and Garman says more than 100 moratoriums are under consideration nationwide. He warned that enacting them could cost the United States the AI race, with consequences lasting generations.
Garman tackles four "myths"
Garman took on four claims: that data centers use too much water, raise electricity bills, produce heavy pollution and offer communities little. On water, he cited an Amazon report saying direct consumption is about 0.5 percent of US industrial water use, far less than golf courses or almond farming. Critics note that such figures leave out water used in power generation and chip manufacturing, and scientists say independent study is needed because no federal or state rules require tech firms to report this data.
On electricity, Garman said prices have risen only in some states with many data centers, mainly because ageing grids were not expanded ahead of demand. An independent watchdog, however, recently blamed data centers as the main driver of a 76 percent annual price jump on the country's largest grid.
On pollution, Garman said critics fixate on the maximum emissions allowed by permits. A planned Amazon facility in Texas is permitted to emit 33 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, more than any US power plant. He countered that backup generators sit idle 99.9 percent of the time, running about ten hours annually, largely for maintenance tests.
On community benefits, he said Amazon has put more than $1 billion into areas with a significant data center presence over three years.
A trust deficit
Whether that will win people over is uncertain. Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei recently called the AI backlash fundamentally a crisis of trust, while writer Jasmine Sun observed that opponents often respond to industry arguments by saying they simply do not believe them.
