NEW YORK (AP) — Amazon will invest more than $1 billion over the next five years in communities where it operates data centers for education, job training, water and energy conservation and other local priorities, in response to growing political and consumer backlash over the tech industry’s deployment of massive buildings.
According to a blog post published Friday by Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon’s cloud computing arm, Amazon has already spent more than $1 billion in communities with a large data center over the past three years.
Garman also said Amazon no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with government agencies it works with on its projects, and said it holds open houses in the communities where it operates to share information about what it does. He also warned against the spread of what he believes is misinformation about the impact of data centers on the environment and energy rates. He cited the dangers of more than 100 moratoriums against the fact that these centers are being considered across the country.
“If these measures are adopted, the United States could find itself on the losing end of this race, and the consequences would last for generations,” he wrote. “As a country, we cannot afford to find ourselves in this position. There is an urgent need to build this data center because we are not the only country seeing the benefits of AI for the economy and national security.”
Garman’s commitment comes as data centers, which power artificial intelligence and cloud computing, have become a burning political issue as the midterms approach as tech giants rush to invest more money into developing this infrastructure.
Small, little-known data centers have been around for decades. But the explosion of artificial intelligence chatbots has given rise to data centers larger than everything any city has ever seen. Some of them dwarf football stadiums and factories and consume more energy than small towns.
By 2030, data centers will represent nearly 3% of projected global electricity consumption, with 935,000 billion watt hours, according to a United Nations University report published in June on the environmental footprint of these buildings.
Amazon said in July that it now plans to spend 220 billion dollars of capital spending in 2026, including on data centers and other technology investments. That’s an increase from its previous estimate of $200 billion.
President Donald Trump has embraced building more data centers, but there are growing distrust on the part of voters. About 6 in 10 Americans favor limiting the number of new data centers that can be built, including most Democrats and Republicans.
And a majority of Americans are “extremely” or “very” concerned about the impact of data centers on electricity prices or water supplies in the communities where they are built.
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