Amazon will stop requiring government officials to sign non-disclosure agreements when working with the company on data centers, part of a new program called the Data Center Commitment that the company says is meant to make its building process more transparent and less disruptive for nearby residents.
Under the program, Amazon pledges to hold community open houses, share details about projects as early as possible, and take local concerns into account as development moves forward. The company also commits to disclosing its energy consumption and efficiency, water consumption and efficiency, and the share of its electricity coming from carbon-free sources on an annual basis.
On efficiency, Amazon reported a global power usage effectiveness of 1.14 for 2025, compared with an industry average of 1.25 and 1.63 for on-premises enterprise data centers. The company said its facilities were 7x more water-efficient than the industry average, and that it had reached 75% of its goal to become water-positive by 2030. Amazon also said new sites will use backup generators that meet EPA Tier 4 emissions standards, though it did not specify which generator classes it plans to deploy, a gap the company left open since those limits vary by engine power and class.
The company said an average U.S. data center consumes around 170,000 gallons of water per day, while an average Amazon facility uses less than 13,000 gallons, a figure it compared to 42 U.S. households. Amazon did not separate the water use of a typical AWS data center built for general-purpose cloud workloads from that of newly built AI data centers filled with power-hungry AI accelerators, which have substantially different cooling needs. Some of the company's comparisons remain ambiguous as it works to answer concerns about data center resource demands.
A separate effort, the Built Together initiative, will add more than $1 billion to Amazon's existing community spending. The company expects to give more than 300,000 students access to free community-college education over five years. It currently runs three Modular Training Centers, has six more under development, and plans another 16, with each able to train roughly 2,000 to 4,000 people annually. Amazon is targeting as many as 100,000 trained workers per year by the end of 2028.
Amazon also plans energy-efficiency upgrades for more than 300 schools and community buildings and 30,000 homes, aiming for energy-bill reductions of 20% to 40% and savings of about $700 per household annually. More than 65 contracted water projects are expected to return over 8 billion gallons per year, more than twice the water Amazon says its data centers consumed in 2025.
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