Amazon Has Stopped Making Councils Sign NDAs Before It Builds A Data Centre

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Amazon Web Services has stopped using nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it negotiates with on data centre projects, chief executive Matt Garman said, alongside a programme called Built Together pledging more than $1 billion to United States communities over five years.

The change applies to future agreements. Amazon has said it does not plan to revisit NDAs already signed, arguing most cease to matter once a project becomes public. Microsoft went further in March, saying it would terminate its existing NDAs with local governments.

Garman cited more than 100 local data centre moratoriums under consideration across the country, framing them as a risk to American competitiveness in artificial intelligence rather than a local matter. Data Center Watch, which tracks these disputes, counted at least 75 projects worth roughly $130 billion blocked or delayed in the first quarter of 2026 alone.

Amazon also said it would publish annual disclosures on energy and water use, and that communities would help determine how the Built Together money is spent.

The announcement followed South Bend mayor James Mueller signing executive orders banning city officials from entering NDAs with data centre operators, after the city's public works director acknowledged signing one with Amazon Web Services in 2023.

House Judiciary Committee Democrats have opened an inquiry into Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle over NDAs that prevented local officials from disclosing project details to residents.

This is a commercial calculation presented as a transparency commitment, and the arithmetic behind it is in the numbers Amazon itself cited.

Seventy-five projects worth roughly $130 billion blocked or delayed in a single quarter. More than a hundred moratoriums under consideration. Those figures describe a permitting problem that has become the binding constraint on AI capacity, ahead of chips, power contracts or capital, none of which are in short supply for a company of Amazon's size.

Secrecy was a reasonable tactic when the main risk was a competitor learning where you were buying land. It stopped being reasonable when the main risk became a council refusing permission because residents learned about a project from a planning notice rather than from the company. An NDA that produces a moratorium costs far more than the information it protects.

Garman's framing makes the logic explicit. He described the moratoriums as a threat to American competitiveness in AI, which is an argument aimed at Washington rather than at the towns doing the blocking, and it tells you what the company thinks the problem is.

The limits are worth noting. The commitment covers future agreements, not the ones already signed, and Amazon's reasoning that old NDAs stop mattering once a project is public is convenient rather than obviously true. Microsoft, which is terminating existing agreements, has taken the harder version. The $1 billion community fund, spread over five years and the whole United States, is small against a capital programme measured in tens of billions a year.

For India the useful part is that the same pressures are arriving through a different door.

The constraint here is not community moratoriums, which are rare, but power and water. Indian data centre capacity is concentrated in Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad and increasingly Navi Mumbai, in a grid that already struggles in summer and in states where agriculture and industry compete for the same water. SB Energy, Nxtra and Neysa have all raised large sums against capacity that has to be powered from somewhere.

What Amazon's disclosure commitment does is set a precedent on what the public is entitled to know. Annual reporting on energy and water consumption is a modest obligation for a company this size, and once a hyperscaler publishes it in one market, declining to publish it in another becomes a position that has to be defended.

Scotland went at the problem from the regulatory end last month, requiring an environmental impact assessment for every facility above 50MW after campaigners noted four pending applications would draw as much power as a nuclear station. Amazon has gone at it voluntarily. Both arrive at the same place, which is that data centre resource use becomes public information.

India has no equivalent requirement. Given that the capacity being built here is largely serving demand that originates elsewhere, and that the memory and power costs underneath it are rising, the question of who gets told what is worth settling before the projects are in the ground rather than after.

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