Amazon said it will no longer use nondisclosure agreements while negotiating with local governments over data centers, following a similar announcement from Microsoft earlier this year. The policy change was buried in a blog post arguing that data centers benefit communities, and it became the topic of a TechCrunch Equity episode with Anthony Ha, Sean O’Kane, and Rebecca Bellan.

O’Kane said the NDA move gets at the root of the tech industry’s data center problems: projects are often negotiated in secret, and sometimes the public cannot even learn who will occupy a facility. He recalled Uber’s mid-2010s practice of quietly negotiating tax subsidies with local governments, which he said led to the company becoming comfortable asking for more. He welcomed Amazon’s decision but cautioned that people are entrenched. Bellan questioned whether the recent wave of moratoriums will have lasting effects, since many last only a year or two while data centers take two to five years to come online. She noted there have been significant moratoriums, including one in San Francisco, but remained doubtful about how much political pushback changes buildout timelines. Ha pointed out that New York’s moratorium is tied to an environmental review expected to take a year, and he said moratoriums are often framed as a pause for study rather than as rejection, giving officials room to later approve projects. Still, he said data center backers appear worried, citing tweets from Donald Trump and David Sacks.

The panel connected the issue to a broader communication failure in tech. O’Kane argued that the industry explains AI and data centers poorly and is frustrated that most people cannot see how these technologies will be useful to them. Ha said he appreciates that community resistance is forcing advocates to make an actual case instead of insisting the AI-driven future is inevitable. The conversation also touched on Tesla: O’Kane noted that a year after renaming its mission from “sustainable abundance” to “amazing abundance,” the company still has not provided a clear definition, and even Tesla fans found the original explanation unspecific.