Amazon follows Microsoft and drops NDAs with local governments over data centers

The announcement didn't arrive as a press release. It was buried inside a longer blog post designed to convince people that data centers are actually good for their communities — Amazon will no longer require non-disclosure agreements when negotiating with local governments over new facilities. The move comes months after Microsoft made the same call. Both companies are reacting to a wave of local moratoriums that have stalled or slowed construction.

On the latest episode of TechCrunch's Equity podcast, Rebecca Bellan voiced skepticism about how much those moratoriums matter long term. Most expire after a year or two, she noted, while the data centers in question aren't expected to come online for another two to five years. Construction is already bogged down by zoning, financing and permitting delays anyway — so the current bans may well lapse before any project reaches a critical stage.

Anthony Ha pushed back. The developers sure look worried, he said. Sean O'Kane went further and named the real problem: the industry simply cannot explain itself. Companies are frustrated that the public cannot picture a world where this infrastructure is useful to them. Instead of bridging that gap, they have been negotiating behind closed doors.

O'Kane drew a parallel to Uber's expansion in the middle of the last decade. Uber cut secret deals with cities over ride subsidies, and the secrecy let it demand ever more concessions without public scrutiny. The same pattern is repeating now, he argued: projects get approved without the public knowing who will occupy them, how much power and water they will consume, or what the impact will be on local electricity bills and property values.

Bellan wondered whether dropping NDAs will actually change anything — or whether communities will just use the new transparency to delay or block infrastructure they decide they don't want. She noted the irony that San Francisco, the city where the industry lives, has passed its own moratorium. For now, neither side has produced data that settles the argument: not the companies demonstrating concrete benefit, not the opponents proving measurable harm.