Amazon recently followed Microsoft’s lead and said it will no longer use nondisclosure agreements (NDAs) while negotiating with local governments over data centers. On the latest episode of TechCrunch’s Equity podcast, Sean O’Kane, Rebecca Bellan, and I discussed Amazon’s announcement, which came in the middle of a longer blog post making the case that data centers are actually good for communities. Rebecca was a bit skeptical that the recent spate of data center moratoriums will have a lasting effect, especially since the moratoriums only last for a year or two and “these data centers aren’t coming online for the next two, three, four, five years,” though I countered that data center backers definitely seem worried.
Sean, meanwhile, suggested that a big reason for the backlash is the industry’s poor communication. Keep reading for a preview of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Sean: It’s an interesting thing that it was sort of buried in the blog post and part of a larger story that Amazon’s clearly trying to tell.
I guess I understand why they weren’t putting it in the foreground, but to me, this is at the root of so many of the problems that the tech industry currently faces when it comes to AI broadly, but data centers in particular. There are so many things that could be said about whether or not people should be worried about the effect that data centers have on their property values, on their electricity bills, on their water usage in the area, and whether or not those things are real problems, inflated problems, etc. I think so much of that just really goes back to the fact that a lot of these projects are being negotiated essentially in secret.
Sometimes they’re being negotiated [with the public knowing] that it’s a data center, but just not knowing who’s actually going to use it or occupy it at any point. This is a long-standing issue with the tech industry. I always go back to the mid-2010s when Uber was expanding really fast.
Uber was one of the companies that really used this tactic a ton when it came to working with local governments. In particular, I remember I was working at The Verge at the time and we had a freelancer write a story about a city outside of Orlando where Uber was trying to negotiate tax subsidies to subsidize rides for people to use public transit after the Uber trip. The whole thing was negotiated in secret.
And not only that, which was frustrating on its face, but also, because of the secrecy, you could just see Uber getting really comfortable with asking for a lot of other stuff, too. So there needs to be more of this. I’m glad Amazon’s doing this.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
