Amazon will invest more than $1 billion over the next five years in communities where it operates data centers, funding education, job training, water and energy preservation projects and other local priorities as backlash against the sector's rollout grows.

The pledge, announced in a Friday blog post by Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon's cloud computing arm AWS, comes on top of more than $1 billion the company says it has already spent in data center communities over the past three years.

Garman paired the spending commitment with policy concessions and a blunt warning. He said Amazon will stop using nondisclosure agreements with the government agencies it works with on data center projects, and that it now hosts open houses in communities where it operates to explain what it is building.

He also pushed back against what he called misinformation about data centers' impact on the environment and electricity rates, and cited more than 100 moratoriums on data center construction now under consideration across the United States.

"If these measures are enacted, the U.S. could be writing its own losing ticket to this race, and the consequences would last generations," Garman wrote. "As a country, we can't afford to find ourselves in that position. There is urgency to this data center build out because we aren't the only country that sees the benefits of AI for the economy and national security."

Political pressure mounts ahead of midterms

The community investment plan lands as data centers have become a hot political issue heading into the midterm elections, with tech giants racing to pour capital into the infrastructure that powers artificial intelligence and cloud computing.

Small, unobtrusive data centers have existed for decades. The explosion of AI chatbots has produced facilities bigger than anything most towns have ever hosted — some dwarf football stadiums and factories and consume more energy than small cities.

The scale is quantifiable. A United Nations University report released in June on the environmental footprint of these buildings projects that by 2030 data centers will account for nearly 3% of the world's electricity use, consuming 935 trillion watt-hours.

For Amazon, the community spending is a small fraction of its broader infrastructure outlay. The company said in July that it expects capital expenditures of $220 billion in 2026, including data centers and other technology investments, up from a prior estimate of $200 billion.

Voters turn wary

President Donald Trump has embraced building more data centers, but voter sentiment is shifting. Roughly 6 in 10 Americans support limiting the number of new data centers that can be built, a view shared by majorities of both Democrats and Republicans, according to polling.

A majority of Americans also describe themselves as "extremely" or "very" concerned about the impact of data centers on electricity prices or the water supply in the communities where they are built.

Amazon's five-year, $1 billion community program, the end of NDAs with government partners and the open-house outreach together mark a clear attempt to defuse that opposition before the moratorium movement spreads — while Garman makes the case that the US buildout cannot afford delay.