Amazon says it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it works with on data center projects, and that it is adding more than $1 billion over five years for the communities around those sites.
Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, frames both moves against a backdrop of local resistance. He writes that more than 100 data center moratoriums are under consideration across the country and warns that enacting them could cost the United States its lead in AI. The company has packaged its practices as the Amazon Data Center Commitment, four tenets covering community protections, local jobs, public engagement and responsible operations.
The NDA change falls under the engagement tenet, alongside open houses in the communities where Amazon operates and a promise to share plans as early as possible. The wording covers government agencies only, and Amazon does not say whether agreements with other parties change.
The money flows through Built Together, a community investment framework that starts in the United States. In Amazon's telling, the $1 billion-plus sits on top of its existing community work and splits into three tracks: free community college and skilled-trades training, energy affordability grants and water projects, and flexible annual funding for local priorities, routed through nonprofits and community foundations.
The first two tracks carry numeric targets, all of them Amazon's own estimates. The college program aims to connect more than 300,000 students to free degree access over five years. The energy grants are meant to reach more than 30,000 homes and trim those households' bills by roughly $700 a year, per Amazon's projections. The flexible track promises millions of dollars a year in each community.
Garman also uses the post to rebut what he calls myths about water, power prices and backup generators. By Amazon's numbers, its average data center uses under 13,000 gallons of water a day, against about 170,000 for a typical facility. Its generators run roughly 10 hours a year, mostly for maintenance tests. Those are company figures rather than independent measurements.
Amazon pairs its rebuttals with promises: a pledge to return more water to communities than its data centers use, utility rates that cover grid upgrades, and Tier 4 backup generators at new sites. The NDA change is the one commitment with no matching myth in the post. Some promises can be checked on a schedule. Amazon plans to start the college program and the energy grants in the coming months, and says it will publish its energy and water use every year.
