On Friday, Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, published a blog post labeled a 12-minute read, under the title "The race our nation can't afford to lose, plus a new commitment from us and a fresh set of community investments."

It opens with a history lesson on the Interstate Highway System, argues that the US will fall behind if towns keep blocking data centers, warns of "misinformation and outright lies" that it says foreign countries are seeding to slow the buildout, and spends more than half its length on that case and on four residents' complaints it files under "myths." Only then does it get to what most media outlets focused on which was its more than $1 billion investment over five years for the towns that host Amazon's data centers.

The program is called Built Together, and it's a serious offer that includes community college tuition for about 300,000 students, 16 skilled-trades training centers, energy-efficiency upgrades for 300-plus schools and 30,000-plus homes, and local grant funds the towns direct themselves.

Next to it, in a list of operating principles Amazon calls its “Data Center Commitment,” is a promise to publish each site's energy use, water use and share of carbon-free power annually. Towns that host data centers have been asking for exactly this kind of thing: local investment, jobs that last beyond the initial construction phase, and transparency on the numbers.

Data centers are one of the fastest-growing sources of local land fights in the US

They use a lot of water, residents and some state regulators say they push up everyone's electricity bills, their diesel backup generators run for testing and during outages, and residents often find out about a project after the deal is done. In Gilroy, Calif., a $2 billion Amazon facility was approved this year with only a single signature from a city planning official, under zoning rules written 45 years ago, with no public vote. Some local leaders had signed NDAs early in the talks but most residents learned about it after construction started. More than 100 towns and counties are weighing moratoriums on new ones. In June, Ohio's legislature put Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft in front of a committee to answer for it and, on Tuesday of last week, Jamie Raskin, the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, sent letters to Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle asking for copies of every NDA each company holds with state and local officials, and why they still use them when Microsoft stopped in March. Friday's post didn't mention Congress but it did include one sentence that sounds like an answer to that request which was, "We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects."

For reputation building, that sentence might matter more than the $1 billion investment and here's why.

When a company wants to build a data center, it negotiates with the town first: land, zoning, tax breaks, how much water and power the site will draw. Until now, Amazon's deals typically came with an NDA for the local officials in that negotiation. So your county commissioner knew the buyer was Amazon, knew the power draw, knew the tax deal, but legally couldn't tell you until it was done. Often the buyer was a shell company with a code name, so even the public paperwork didn't say Amazon. Every other complaint on the list like water, bills, generators, is an argument a company would then have in public and sometimes win. An NDA means the argument happens after the decision is done which is what's turned zoning disputes into a trust problem.

Amazon's position was different four months ago.

At that Ohio hearing on June 4, Amazon's policy executive Craig Sundstrom defended NDAs as "an important economic development tool," while Microsoft's Daniel Brown told the same lawmakers Microsoft would "no longer use" them. Amazon and Google defended the practice that day; none of the three matched Microsoft, and now the CEO of AWS has written "we no longer use" them. That's a reversal and the change is meaningful because now on new projects, local officials can tell residents who the buyer is and what the deal says.

But look at what it covers. Microsoft's March commitment had two parts: stop signing new NDAs, and find and cancel the old ones. (Microsoft kept two exceptions: it still uses NDAs when it buys private land, and it may still try to keep proprietary design details out of public records.) Amazon's covers new ones only. When GeekWire asked about the existing agreements, Amazon said it doesn't plan to revisit them, and that most stop applying once a project becomes public. That answer isn't in the post and it's also the opposite of what Raskin asked for. He didn't ask for a promise about future projects; he asked for copies of every agreement already signed, by October 13.

There's a second thing the messaging doesn't settle. In June, Sundstrom described NDAs as a tool local governments could choose to use. So the question for Amazon now is simple: if a town asks for an NDA, will Amazon sign it? If yes, June's position still stands and Friday's sentence is only about who asks first. If no, that's a real break with how the company has worked.

The data-center narrative continues to evolve

For most of this buildout, the fight has been primarily about jobs and tax revenue versus water and electricity bills, and a company could usually settle it with a large enough investment number. Now the fight is evolving into secrecy. Microsoft dropped NDAs in March, Amazon followed in October, and any company building, hosting, financing or powering a data center will be judged as much by what it discloses as by what it donates. So the planning question has changed too. It used to be "what are we offering the town." Now it's "what are we asking the town to keep confidential, and could we defend that if it were read out at a public hearing."

If the answer is no, stop asking for it now, before a legislator or a reporter makes you. And run the same test on everything written for the national audience, because local is where it ends up being read. If the AI-competitiveness argument can't be read aloud at the town meeting without insulting the people in the room, it needs a different message, and the one for the town should be about its water, its power and its tax base and nothing else. Putting them together is how a resident's question about her well ends up labeled a myth, and how a company ends up in a letter from Congress.

Amazon has given communities something to hold it to. The first thing they'll learn is how many of their officials are still bound by old agreements, and whether Amazon will tell them.