Amazon Promises More Local Funding and Less Secrecy Around Data Centers

Amazon has become the latest big technology company to promise money for local communities and policy changes in reaction to anti-data-center sentiment that has become a political flashpoint around the country.

In a lengthy blog post on Friday, the company pledged $1 billion over five years to communities for work force development, energy efficiency projects and other local priorities. Amazon also said it no longer used nondisclosure agreements with government agencies, a common practice that has created distrust with local residents.

Without mentioning China by name, Matt Garman, the head of Amazon’s cloud computing division, said in the post that other countries were gunning to be at the forefront of A.I. development. More than 100 data center moratoriums are being considered across the country, he wrote, and “if these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations.”

The tech industry has been on a data center building spree despite intense pushback around the country. The biggest tech companies will spend more than $750 billion on capital expenditures this year, with Amazon the top builder. Some of the facilities are traditional data centers that power online computing. Others, like a flagship Amazon data center in Indiana, have been tailored to the immense computing needs of artificial intelligence.

Other large tech companies have made similar commitments this year. Meta, for example, pledged $1 billion for communities and job training programs, and Microsoft pledged this year to stop using nondisclosure agreements with local governments.

Rising local opposition has scuttled or delayed projects and has created a new bottleneck for tech companies looking to build quickly.