Amazon's data centre commitment
On Wednesday the Senate blocked the law that would have made data centres pay the full cost of connecting to the grid. On Friday Amazon promised to do it anyway, and to stop asking governments to sign secrecy agreements. Does the paperwork where it builds say the same?
The Quote
We no longer use nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects.
Amazon, "The race our nation can't afford to lose", signed by Matt Garman, chief executive of Amazon Web Services, Oct 2, 2026Where it stands
- Not yet due No nondisclosure agreements with government agencies on its projects. Every new site from Oct 2, 2026
- Not yet due The prices it pays cover the energy and the grid upgrades its data centres need. Each utility filing, state by state
- Not yet due Publish energy use, water use and the share of carbon-free power every year. First figures by October 2027
- Not yet due Backup generators at new sites meet the EPA's Tier 4 standard. Each new air permit
- Not yet due More than $1 billion over five years for the places it builds in. October 2031
What would settle it
Four kinds of public paper, none of them Amazon's. A utility that serves a large data centre files the rate or the special contract with its state commission, and that filing shows who pays for the new lines and substations. A county that signs a nondisclosure agreement with a developer has created a public record, and one dated after Oct 2 would settle that sentence by itself. A backup generator needs an air permit that states its emissions tier. And the annual figures on energy and water either appear or they do not. Read the wording with care. Most of the commitment describes what Amazon says it already does, in the present tense, so it is partly a description and only partly a promise. The sentence about secrecy agreements is the exception: "no longer" concedes that it used them. The timing is ours to note and not Amazon's to answer for. The post does not mention the Senate vote, and nothing we have found records what position the company took on the bill.
A year on, when the first annual figures are due
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days to go, on 2 October 2027
Amazon
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the close
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The people
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Andy Jassy
President and CEO, Amazon
Runs the company that made the commitment. He did not write the post and nothing on this page suggests he did.
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Matt Garman
Chief Executive, Amazon Web Services
Signed the post. The data centres are his division's.
Filings since 2 October 2026
Amazon, from the SEC's own feed
- Checking EDGAR...
On the record since then
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- 2026-10-30 Filing The 80 percent is in the utility's tariff. Indiana Michigan Power's Industrial Power tariff, sheets 21.3 to 21.7, issued under the Indiana Utility Regulatory Commission's order of Feb 19, 2025 in Cause No. 46097, covers every customer of 70 MW or more at one plant, or 150 MW across several. For each of them the monthly billing demand is never less than the greater of 80 percent of contract capacity or 80 percent of the highest demand of the past 11 months. The same sheets require a contract of at least 12 years and an exit fee for cutting capacity by more than 20 percent, and they ask large customers for collateral. So the guarantee Amazon describes is what the tariff requires of any data centre that size in I&M's Indiana territory. Amazon's page does not call it voluntary, and on this point it is accurate. Amazon's own contract with I&M has not been read here, and the tariff does not test the page's other claim, that Amazon covers 100 percent of the electricity costs. Read from the tariff book I&M published on Sep 29, 2026, through the Internet Archive's copy of Oct 8; I&M's site refused our reader. Source
- 2026-10-27 Statement Amazon posted a state-by-state page on its data-centre sites. For Indiana Michigan Power it says Amazon "covers 100% of the electricity costs" of its data centres and guarantees payment for at least 80 percent of its projected demand "whether we use that capacity or not". For Texas it says Amazon pays "the full costs of powering our operations". These are the company's words again. The 80 percent figure is specific enough for a utility's own contract filing to confirm or not, and that filing has not been read here yet. Source
- 2026-10-02 Note The post calls it "misleading and convenient scapegoating" to blame data centres for rising electricity rates. Executive Order 14421, signed five weeks earlier, names data centres among the causes of the strain on the grid. One sentence is about prices and the other about reliability, so they do not contradict each other. They are worth reading side by side. Source
- 2026-10-02 Statement Amazon published what it calls its Data Center Commitment. It says the prices it pays are "sufficient to cover both the energy and infrastructure improvements that may be required", that it no longer uses nondisclosure agreements with government agencies, that new sites will use Tier 4 backup generators, and that it will publish its energy and water use every year. It adds more than $1 billion over five years for the communities it builds in. The same post says more than 100 data centre moratoriums are under consideration across the country. Source
- 2026-09-30 Vote The Senate refused to take up H.R. 9340, the Ratepayer Protection Act, which would have set a federal standard requiring a utility to recover from a large data centre the full cost of the upgrades needed to serve it. The vote was 57 to 43 and it needed 60. All 53 Republicans voted to proceed, joined by four Democrats: Hassan, Klobuchar, Ossoff and Warnock. Source
- 2026-09-16 Vote The House had passed the same bill 417 to 3 two weeks before. Source
Closes come from a market data feed and can lag a session; the date is printed next to every number. Filings come from EDGAR. Nothing on this page is advice or a recommendation to buy or sell anything. This one opened on a statement, and becomes a receipt the day a document settles it.
