Amazon Drops NDAs on Data Center Deals, Following Microsoft

Amazon said it will no longer use nondisclosure agreements while negotiating with local governments over data centers, becoming the second hyperscaler this year to abandon a practice critics say let the industry cut deals in secret.

The announcement, which Amazon buried inside a longer blog post arguing that data centers benefit communities, follows a similar pledge Microsoft made earlier this year. TechCrunch commentators unpacked the move on the latest episode of the Equity podcast, and their discussion frames the central question now facing the AI infrastructure buildout: can transparency fix a relationship between the tech industry and local communities that has already broken down?

The stakes are large. Data centers underpin the AI boom, and communities across the United States have responded with moratoriums on new projects — including one recently passed in San Francisco, a city not typically associated with anti-tech politics. New York State has imposed its own pause.

Why did Amazon drop the NDAs?

Amazon's announcement came in the middle of a blog post making the case that data centers are good for the communities that host them. The company did not put the NDA decision at the top of the post.

TechCrunch's Sean O'Kane, who covers the space, found that placement telling.

"It's an interesting thing that it was sort of buried in the blog post and part of a larger story that Amazon's clearly trying to tell," O'Kane said on the podcast. "I guess I understand why they weren't putting it in the foreground, but to me, this is at the root of so many of the problems that the tech industry currently faces when it comes to AI broadly, but data centers in particular."

O'Kane argued that public distrust stems less from the specific effects of data centers — on property values, electricity bills, or water usage — than from how the deals get made.

"I think so much of that just really goes back to the fact that a lot of these projects are being negotiated essentially in secret," he said. "Sometimes they're being negotiated [with the public knowing] that it's a data center, but just not knowing who's actually going to use it or occupy it at any point."

The NDA question touches property values, utility rates, and water consumption — the exact issues residents raise at local hearings. When the public cannot see who is negotiating what, every rumor fills the vacuum.

How deep does the precedent go?

This is not the tech industry's first fight over secretive local negotiations. O'Kane traced the pattern back a decade.

"This is a long-standing issue with the tech industry. I always go back to the mid-2010s when Uber was expanding really fast," he said. "Uber was one of the companies that really used this tactic a ton when it came to working with local governments."

He recalled a specific case from his time at The Verge: a city outside Orlando, where Uber negotiated tax subsidies in secret to subsidize rides connecting people to public transit.

"The whole thing was negotiated in secret. And not only that, which was frustrating on its face, but also, because of the secrecy, you could just see Uber getting really comfortable with asking for a lot of other stuff, too," O'Kane said.

His verdict on Amazon's move was measured. "So there needs to be more of this. I'm glad Amazon's doing this. We'll see if it actually does have any positive effect, but people are pretty entrenched right now."

Will the moratoriums actually stop anything?

Community opposition has produced results — but perhaps fewer than the headlines suggest. TechCrunch's Rebecca Bellan, who has spoken with people who deal with data centers daily, questioned whether the wave of moratoriums will have a lasting effect.

"What I've heard from some people I've spoken to, who deal with data centers every day, a lot of these moratoriums that are getting passed — and there are a significant number of them, including one recently in San Francisco, which is pretty ironic — but they're only for like a year or two years," she said.

The timing matters. "But these data centers aren't coming online for the next two, three, four, five years," Bellan said. "All of the buildouts are going to be massively delayed for a number of reasons from zoning to funding."

Her conclusion: "Of course, if the pushback keeps going, then it might have an effect, but I often wonder just how much of an effect this political pushback is having on this."

TechCrunch's Anthony Ha pointed to New York as a case study in built-in wiggle room. The state's moratorium covers permits for large projects and technically lasts until the state finalizes an environmental review process, which is expected to take a year.

"So already, there's some wiggle room within that," Ha said. "And often, they're framed as: 'It's not like we think [data centers are] bad, let's not do this. It's [that] we need to take the time to study this.' Which gives them a lot of room to say later on, 'Actually, we've decided this is great. We love it.'"

Still, Ha reads the industry's behavior as a sign of genuine concern. "But you can tell that the people trying to build these data centers are worried, which is why you have these unhinged tweets from people like Trump or David Sacks," he said. "Only time will tell in terms how long and how deep that [community] resistance is, but I do think they are worried."

What does ending NDAs actually change?

Ha does not expect transparency alone to win over opponents. "I don't think that getting rid of the NDAs automatically is going to make the people who opposed these data centers be like, 'Great, let's let's do it. I'm in,'" he said.

But he argued the NDAs sit at the start of the argument. "But I think the beginning of that conversation is, 'Well, we don't even know what the heck you're doing, because you've negotiated all this stuff in secret.' So it does seem like a good first step."

O'Kane pushed the diagnosis further, framing the industry's problem as fundamentally one of communication — made worse by an era in which tech companies increasingly bypass traditional media.

"We've seen, through a lot of the controversy and backlash to AI and data centers, that the industry just does a really poor job explaining itself, and that they are obviously and constantly frustrated with the fact that most people can't envision a world in which this stuff is useful for them," he said. "And that's because, a lot of time, the [technological] ability's not there, and in part because they're just not explaining it well."

He pointed to Tesla as the extreme case. A year after the company adopted "abundance" — originally "sustainable abundance," now "amazing abundance" — as its mission statement, it released a multi-page PDF explaining it, and even Tesla's biggest fans criticized Elon Musk for how unspecific it was.

"It's just wild to me that we're a year into that, and the company still doesn't have a very good definition of it," O'Kane said. "It read like LLM nonsense."

Is the 'inevitability' narrative dead?

Ha said the pushback has punctured something larger than any single permitting fight: the framing that AI-driven infrastructure was unstoppable.

"One of the things this has made me think about is just the narrative and this sense that for a while, it really felt like it was being pushed down our throats — this idea of, 'This is inevitable, this AI-driven future, and get on board or you're just going to be left behind,'" he said.

"Obviously that future is barreling ahead in a lot of ways, but in a few key ways, there have been these obstacles. What I've really liked about that is this sense of 'No, you actually have to make the case for it.' You can't just say, 'This is the future, shut up.'"

On Tesla specifically, Ha said the surprise was not the vagueness of the promise but the promise itself. "What was shocking to me is not so much that they haven't come up with a definition of abundance, but that that was a promise that they were making in the first place," he said. "It's not about, is this company going to sell a lot of cars? It's about this vision for remaking society. Or at least, that's what they're being sold."

For the data center industry, the immediate test is whether Amazon's and Microsoft's NDA withdrawals change the texture of local negotiations before the current wave of moratoriums expires. The companies will keep building either way; what remains uncertain is whether communities will keep fighting once the deals come out of the dark.