AWS stops using NDAs with government agencies on its data center projects

Erin Brockovich ranks the complaints she hears about data centers, and transparency comes first ^[3]. The projects, she said, follow a pattern: "projects announced after permits are already secured, developers who don't return calls, local officials who signed NDAs before their neighbors knew a project was being considered." ^[3]

Amazon's change addresses the last item on that list. "We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects," Garman wrote ^[6]. The first two items are about how a developer treats residents. A policy on agency agreements does not reach them, at least as written. The sentence does not say when the policy took effect or whether it covers agreements already signed ^[6].

The rest of the post rests on what teams tell themselves users do: residents oppose data centers because they believe myths, so the fix is better facts ^[5]. According to writer Jasmine Sun, what users actually do is hear the tech companies' arguments and answer, "I don't believe them." ^[17] The AI backlash, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said, is "a crisis of trust." ^[16]

In the pollution section, Garman said critics focus on the maximum a permit allows ^[15]. "The truth is data center generators almost never run," he said. "They're idle 99.9% of the time (they run roughly 10 hours per year, mostly for required maintenance testing)." ^[14] The two figures agree with each other. Ten hours is about 0.11% of the 8,760 hours in a year ^[1]. Both describe Amazon's equipment as Amazon says it runs, whereas the permit limit is the number a regulator signed ^[13].

The count of more than 100 moratoriums under consideration comes from Garman himself ^[2]. "If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations," he said ^[8]. On this record, dropping agency NDAs is a concession to one specific complaint. An executive arguing against those moratoriums announced it in public ^[3][6].

For the planner who has to defend a vote, I would sort each claim in a pitch like Garman's by two tests. One is whether residents got it in time to weigh in. The other is whether anyone outside the company can check it. Dropping agency NDAs helps with the first test only. A permit limit set by a regulator passes the second ^[13]. Generator hours and community contribution totals fail it, and in Sun's account those are the kinds of claims opponents meet with disbelief ^[7][14][17]. A claim that fails the first test belongs to the old pattern Brockovich described, where an official's NDA was one of three ways residents ended up last to know ^[3].