Amazon Drops Data Center NDAs but Leaves Older Deals Intact

Amazon said on October 2, 2026 that it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with government agencies on data center projects. The same post launched Built Together, which will add more than $1 billion over five years in U.S. towns that host its sites.

AWS chief executive Matt Garman tied both moves to a warning that local pauses could cost the country the AI race, writing that more than 100 data center moratoriums are being considered. The NDA line is real. The paper it does not touch is the rest of the story.

A Present-Tense Line on Government NDAs

Garman’s post, more than 3,000 words, wraps existing practices into an Amazon Data Center Commitment and then adds the one line opponents have been demanding. Amazon will no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it works with on its projects. It will host open houses, share plans earlier, and publish energy use, water use, efficiency, and the share of energy from carbon-free sources each year.

David Zapolsky, Amazon’s chief global affairs and legal officer, has described the old habit in plainer terms. “The industry comes from a history of secrecy and so some of that’s just reflex,” he said.

Right now there are over 100 data center moratoriums being considered across the country. If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations.

Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, company post, October 2, 2026

The commitment also repeats a power promise Amazon already made in March, when it joined six other firms in a White House pledge to pay for power and grid upgrades their sites require. New backup generators are supposed to meet EPA Tier 4 limits, the strictest federal diesel standard. Garman wrote that those machines sit idle 99.9% of the time and run about 10 hours a year, mostly for tests.

What the New Rule Leaves Standing

The sentence is written in the present tense, and Amazon said the change applies going forward. It does not plan to reopen past agreements, most of which, the company said, fall away once a project is public. That is a narrower step than it first sounds, because the fights that made NDAs famous were often about deals already signed.

WHAT WE KNOW

• Who is covered: Amazon’s new line applies to government agencies it works with on data center projects.
• When it starts: The company said the change is going forward and that it does not plan to revisit past NDAs.
• What it will publish: Annual figures for energy, water, efficiency, and the share of power from carbon-free sources.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• Consultants: Amazon has not said whether the promise covers site selectors and advisers that have officials sign NDAs in its place.
• Old files: There is no public pledge to void, release, or summarize secrecy pacts still sitting in county drawers.
• Shell names: The post does not say Amazon will stop using holding companies that hide the end tenant until a records fight forces the name out.

Those gaps matter in places where the identity of the tenant was the secret. In Pima County, Arizona, officials signed an NDA in 2023 that could keep Amazon’s role in Project Blue quiet for five years or until the job was finished. A public records request later named AWS. Amazon has since left that project. In South Bend, Indiana, Public Works director Eric Horvath has said he signed an NDA with AWS in 2023, which left city staff unable to answer basic questions about a campus that later drew more than $13.8 billion of Amazon money.

Microsoft Closed Old NDAs in March

Microsoft moved first. On March 18, 2026, it said it would end NDAs with local governments and that it is working to identify any active NDAs worldwide so those pacts can be terminated. Rima Alaily, a Microsoft corporate vice president and general counsel, said the firm will still use NDAs for private land deals and will still protect trade secrets and design details, but will not use them as the default with city hall.

Two days before Garman’s post, House Judiciary Committee ranking member Jamie Raskin sent letters to Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle. He asked why they still required non-disclosure agreements with public officials after Microsoft had already stopped. The letters, dated September 29 and released September 30, demand copies of NDAs with federal, state, or local officials since 2021, plus projected power and water use, and an explanation of whether those pacts were used to block public records requests.

Residents cannot weigh a project’s costs against its benefits, hold their officials accountable, or safeguard their own resources when the basic terms are kept secret.

Rep. Jamie Raskin, ranking member, House Judiciary Committee, September 30, 2026 letters

Raskin’s staff pointed to Amazon’s broad “proprietary” and “confidential” language and to shell companies that hid the tenant. He also cited a Google secrecy request in San Jose and a pact that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry signed with a Meta subsidiary tied to a $50 billion campus. Amazon had already told interviewers it no longer uses government NDAs; the October 2 post put that claim on the company site. Google, Meta, and Oracle had not answered the same questions in public by then.

On September 24, Reps. Greg Landsman, Tom Barrett, and Raskin introduced the No Secrets for Data Centers Act, which would void NDAs that hide project details and limit subsidies tied to keeping those details quiet. Eric Bonds, a University of Mary Washington sociologist, found NDAs in 25 of 31 Virginia localities with existing or proposed data centers.

HOW THE TWO NDA POLICIES DIFFER

Asked whether it would match Microsoft and forgo local tax breaks, Amazon declined. It said it is already the largest taxpayer in almost every town where it operates, and that governments offer incentives to land the work. Watchdog group Good Jobs First has tallied about $1 billion in property tax breaks over 15 years for five Amazon data centers in Morrow County, Oregon, which it called the largest known subsidy in the company’s history at the time of that 2023 review.

$1 Billion Next to a $13.8 Billion Campus

Built Together will add more than $1 billion over five years, on top of more than $1 billion Amazon says it already put into data center towns over the past three years. Spread evenly, the new pledge is about $200 million a year. Amazon is projecting about $220 billion in capital spending in 2026, largely on data centers and chips, so that annual community check is about 0.09% of this year’s capex plan.

THE MONEY NEXT TO THE PLEDGE

Brandon Oyer, AWS director of power and water for the Americas, said on July 23, 2026 that New Carlisle had already taken $13.8 billion, past the original $11 billion goal, with construction still running. “Today we’re announcing we’ve already invested 13.8 billion dollars and we’re only part of the way done,” Oyer said. The campus is slated for about 30 buildings, with about 18 operating then. Amazon says it has hired more than 1,000 people there, including more than 800 Hoosiers and about 450 from St. Joseph County, at an average salary of $77,000.

Garman used the same county as his tax exhibit. Amazon’s payments to St. Joseph County are estimated at more than $3 billion, he wrote, against $1.2 million under the land’s prior use. In Montgomery County, Missouri, he put taxes at more than $1.8 billion over 25 years against about $200,000 from the old use. Those figures are Amazon’s. They also show why a five-year, more than $1 billion national fund can look large in a press post and small on a single fence line.

In Madison County, Mississippi (population 116,000), Amazon cited more than 2,300 people in construction and more than 1,700 operations jobs to come. Newton County, Georgia (population 125,000) was listed at more than 1,500 construction workers and 400 operations jobs. Construction payrolls are real. They are also temporary, which is why towns keep asking who pays for substations after the cranes leave.

Free College and Home Upgrades in Data Center Towns

Built Together is organized around three buckets Amazon says towns asked for: school and job training, energy and water bills, and grants whose uses locals pick. Amazon told interviewers it expects to put more than $100 million up front into community college endowments and roughly another $100 million into training centers, with agreements at 26 colleges already in motion. The college program is due to launch in the next few months.

BUILT TOGETHER OVER FIVE YEARS

• Free college: Amazon will cover remaining out-of-pocket costs after aid for certificates or associate degrees, and estimates it will connect over 300,000 students in data center towns.
• Training yards: It operates three modular training centers now, has six more in development, and plans 16 additional sites; by the end of 2028 it wants those yards to prepare up to 100,000 workers a year.
• Bills and buildings: Grants target upgrades at more than 300 schools and community buildings and over 30,000 homes, with claimed savings of about $700 per household a year and bill cuts of 20 to 40%.

The training centers are physical shops on or near campuses, with electrical trainers, fiber splicers, mock data halls, and outdoor yards. Programs run 4 to 16 weeks in trades such as electrical work, HVAC, and fiber. Amazon says each site can train about 2,000 to 4,000 people a year, with the company paying the tab.

On water, Amazon restated a goal to be water positive across its data centers by 2030, returning more water than it uses, and said it was 75% of the way there as of 2025, with sites seven times more water-efficient than the industry average. It has contracted for 65 water projects near its operations that are expected to return more than 8 billion gallons a year, more than double what its data centers used in 2025. Garman also wrote that an average Amazon data center uses less than 13,000 gallons a day, about 42 U.S. households, and called the “five million gallons a day” soundbite false.

Tech analyst Carolina Milanesi put the split in one pair of lines after the post landed: the AI race language is aimed at Washington, and the program is aimed at the counties. That is the design. A town can take the college seats and still vote to freeze new halls if the substation fight is ugly.

Why More Than 100 Towns Are Pausing Builds

Garman’s “over 100” figure is his count of moratoriums under consideration, not a census of every pause already on the books. Data Center Watch, which tracks large projects delayed or blocked by opposition, counted at least 75 U.S. proposals worth about $130 billion in the first quarter of 2026 alone. A YouGov poll taken August 28 to 31, 2026 found that 63% of Americans would oppose a data center in their own community.

The resistance is local and practical. People argue about groundwater, diesel permits, and whose name is on the tax abatement. Amazon’s carbon emissions rose 16% last year as it added capacity, even as it holds a net-zero target for 2040 and calls itself the largest corporate buyer of carbon-free energy since 2019. In August, AWS withdrew a 2.4 million square foot plan in Calvert County, Maryland; two weeks later the county passed a six-month freeze on new data centers.

Garman treated some of that anger as imported. “This build out is so important geopolitically that there are widespread reports of various countries intentionally seeding misinformation in the U.S. about data centers to trick us into slowing down,” he wrote. OpenAI and X have flagged China-linked accounts posting about campuses. Those accounts have not been shown to reach a wide public, and the fights on the ground still run on water, rates, and secrecy. A blog post that recasts a county vote as a national-security error is asking residents to treat their own bills as a rounding error in someone else’s race.

HOW THE NDA FIGHT REACHED AMAZON

1. January 2026: Microsoft announces its Community-First AI Infrastructure Plan, including a pledge to skip local tax breaks.
2. March 18, 2026: Microsoft ends NDAs with local governments and starts terminating existing ones worldwide.
3. March 2026: Amazon and six other firms sign the White House Ratepayer Protection Pledge.
4. Mid-September 2026: South Bend Mayor James Mueller bans city officials from signing data center NDAs after the 2023 AWS pact.
5. September 24, 2026: Reps. Greg Landsman, Tom Barrett, and Jamie Raskin introduce the No Secrets for Data Centers Act.
6. September 30, 2026: Raskin sends letters to Amazon, Google, Meta, and Oracle demanding NDA files and water and power projections.
7. October 2, 2026: Garman publishes the Data Center Commitment and launches Built Together.

Siting, not slogans, is why these fights keep landing in town halls. Campuses need substations, fiber, and construction crews, so they go where roads and labor already exist, then the neighbors vote. Building “in the middle of nowhere” still means a grid tap and a workforce, which is why the map of pauses keeps filling in around real towns.

The Consultant Paper County Judges Still Sign

The cleanest hole in the new rule is the one Amazon would not close. End tenants often never sit across the table from the county. Site selectors do. In Wharton County, Texas, Judge Philip Spenrath signed a sweeping NDA not with Amazon but with VisionFirst Advisors, a consulting firm that has worked with Amazon, covering design details, finances, and business plans for Project Eagle, a nearly 3,000 acre, $10 billion campus of 10 halls near Boling. Amazon said it typically uses consultants in the early phase and did not say whether Friday’s promise covers those contracts.

On the same day as Garman’s post, Wharton’s water fight moved a step. The Coastal Bend Groundwater Conservation District had approved permits on September 8 allowing Amazon to take up to 78.2 million gallons over two and a half years for restrooms, construction, and fire protection. Amazon doubled the project’s promised full-time jobs to 300 and set up a Wharton County Community Fund with an initial $200,000. That local check is the Built Together idea in miniature: real money, tiny next to a $10 billion fence line, offered after the secrecy fight had already started.

South Bend had already stopped waiting for Amazon’s tense. Mueller’s mid-September orders bar city staff from signing new data center NDAs, after Horvath’s 2023 AWS agreement left residents talking to officials who said they could not talk. The October 2 line would not have unwritten that file. Microsoft at least said it would hunt the old ones down.

Raskin still wants the agreements themselves, including any that consultants carried. Until those pages are public, Amazon’s present-tense sentence and the more than $1 billion around it are a bid to keep the next county from joining the moratorium list, written after the last round of secret paper had already done its work.