This is an advocacy post on Amazon’s own site, written by the chief executive of AWS and structured as a rebuttal to four claims it calls myths. Every operating figure below is Amazon-stated and unverified here.Two different billion-dollar figures appear in it, covering different periods, and they are kept separate below.
AWS CEO Matt Garman published a corporate advocacy post this week. Two of its tenets are the ones worth watching — because they are what make everything else checkable.
On Amazon’s own site, AWS chief executive Matt Garman published a post called Data Centers Built Together. It is structured as a rebuttal of four things it labels myths about data centres. It is a corporate advocacy document, written while communities across the United States are objecting to data-centre construction near them. Every operating figure in it is Amazon-stated and is not independently verified here.
The post announces what Amazon calls its Data Center Commitment — a set of tenets the company says it is codifying from existing practices. Garman is explicit on that framing: Amazon describes these as practices it is now formalising, not a wholesale new policy. Two of the tenets stand apart from the rest, because they are the ones that give anyone outside the company a way to check the others.
The post also introduces Built Together, described as a new community investment framework for data-centre communities, starting in the United States. Separately, Amazon states it has contributed more than one billion dollars to U.S. communities with meaningful data-centre presence over the past three years. Built Together is separate and prospective: Amazon says it will add more than one billion dollars over the next five years on top of what it is already doing. These are two separate figures covering different periods and different purposes.
The key insight: Amazon’s post is rich with operating figures — PUE, water efficiency, carbon-free energy. None of them can be checked from outside today. The two disclosure tenets are structurally significant precisely because they are the mechanism by which the others become verifiable. That is not an accusation. It is an observation about how accountability actually works.
Almost every other number in the post is Amazon-stated and cannot be checked from outside. This commitment is the one that would change that.
The Structural Read
Read through the Permission Layer framework and the logic of the post becomes clear. Amazon’s data-centre expansion is constrained not just by capital or land, but by social and regulatory permission. Communities that object can slow or block sites. Local officials who cannot speak — because of NDAs — cannot reassure or inform residents. That friction is a genuine expansion bottleneck.
The first tenet addresses that directly. In the present tense, the post states: “We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.” The post gives no date for when this changed and no detail on scope beyond government agencies involved in projects. That is the boundary of what is stated.
The second tenet is the verification mechanism for everything else. The post states: “We will publish our energy use, energy efficiency, water use, water efficiency, and the percent of energy from carbon free resources for the public to review on an annual basis.” If that commitment is kept, the PUE of 1.14, the water-efficiency claim of seven times the industry average, and the water-positive trajectory become checkable. Right now, they are not.
Permission Layer — Business Engineer
“The companies that move fastest at physical infrastructure scale are the ones that solve the permission problem — not just the engineering problem. Transparency commitments are a form of regulatory pre-emption: they reduce the surface area for objection before it becomes organised opposition.”
The rest of the post’s claims are worth noting clearly. Amazon states a 2025 global PUE of 1.14 against an industry average it gives as 1.25 and on-premises enterprise data centres at 1.63. It states its sites are seven times more water-efficient than the industry average. It states new sites will use backup generators meeting the EPA Tier 4 emissions standard or regional equivalents. It states a commitment to be water positive by 2030 and says it was 75 per cent of the way there as of 2025. All figures are Amazon-stated.
The post also references a Sustainability Exchange, through which Amazon says it shares innovations in data centre design, materials and cooling to enable industry participants to benefit. The shape of the Built Together money is worth stating precisely: it is community investment covering education, workforce training, energy affordability and local priorities. It is not capital expenditure on data centres, not compute capacity, and not an equity raise.
Three Implications
The NDA tenet is already stated as done
Amazon uses the present tense: “We no longer use” NDAs with government agencies on projects. The scope is limited to those agencies. The date of change is not given. That makes this a stated current practice, not a future pledge — but one with undefined boundaries until more detail is published.
Annual disclosure is the lynchpin of the whole document
Every operating figure in the post — PUE, water efficiency, carbon-free energy share — currently rests on Amazon’s own reporting. The annual-publication tenet is the only commitment that would let external parties independently track whether those figures hold or improve over time. Its absence would leave the rest of the post unverifiable indefinitely.
The two $1 billion figures serve different functions
The more than $1 billion contributed over the past three years is a record of past spending. The more than $1 billion added over the next five years under Built Together is a new, forward-looking commitment, described as additional to existing activity. Conflating them overstates one and misrepresents the other. The new money targets community benefit — not infrastructure build-out.
Business Engineer Framework
The Permission Layer
Amazon’s disclosure tenets are a textbook Permission Layer move. At physical infrastructure scale, the binding constraint on expansion is often not capital or engineering — it is the social and regulatory licence to build. Transparency commitments reduce that friction structurally. The Business Engineer framework maps exactly how this plays out across AI infrastructure and beyond.
Matt Garman’s post is corporate advocacy, and it should be read as such. That does not make its two disclosure tenets unimportant — it makes them the only parts of the document with structural teeth. No more NDAs with government agencies on projects lets local officials speak. Annual publication of five environmental metrics lets anyone check whether the PUE of 1.14 and the seven-times water-efficiency claim hold up over time.
Until that annual data appears, those figures are Amazon’s own. When it does appear, the post will either age well or it won’t.
Every detail above comes from a post on Amazon’s own site, written by Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, and structured as a rebuttal of four things it labels myths about data centres. It is an advocacy document and every operating figure in it is Amazon-stated. None has been independently verified here.Two separate figures of more than one billion dollars appear in that post and they are not the same money.
Amazon says it has contributed more than one billion dollars to US communities over the PAST THREE YEARS, and that Built Together will add more than one billion dollars over the NEXT FIVE YEARS. Nothing above combines them.Nothing above accuses Amazon of concealing anything or of publishing false figures. The narrower point made above is that the operating figures cannot be checked from outside today, and that the commitment to publish five metrics annually is the one that would change that.
The post gives no start date, format or venue for that publication, and no date for when the practice on nondisclosure agreements changed.Amazon describes the tenets as a codification of practices it says it already follows, not as entirely new policy. This post concerns community commitments and operating practice; it is unrelated to Amazon’s separate chip-financing arrangements.Nothing above predicts anything and nothing here is investment advice.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
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