A BBC Radio 4 podcast on crisis communications put a remarkable document on my radar this week.
The programme is When It Hits the Fan, presented by David Yelland, the former editor of The Sun and now a corporate communications adviser, alongside crisis specialist Farzana Baduel, CEO of Curzon PR. I'd recommend it. Listen and read the document, or vice versa. It puts an interesting spin on events and speaks to the rearguard AWS is fighting.
The document is a 3,000-word blog post published on 2 October by Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services. Garman addresses, point by point, what he calls the "myths" circulating about data centres. Are they draining local water supplies? No. Are they driving up energy bills? Not primarily. Do their backup generators pollute? Rarely. Do communities benefit from hosting them? Far more than most people realise.
He uses national security/old cold war rhetoric, warns that more than 100 data centre moratoriums are under consideration across the United States, and alleges that foreign governments are deliberately seeding misinformation to slow American AI development.
What came before
Amazon has spent years concealing its identity in data centre planning processes. The company used shell companies, project codenames, and non-disclosure agreements with government agencies so its involvement stayed hidden for as long as possible. The logic was it followed was fairly binary.
Put simply, if the Amazon name appeared on a planning application, opposition organised quickly. Anonymity bought time and lower costs.
The same tactics appeared to have been deployed in the UK. Amazon filed a planning application in Oxfordshire through a company that turned out to be defunct. Its Didcot project, aimed at converting a former coal power station site into data centres, was pursued under an alias. That approach seems to have seeded (an understandable) mistrust and allowed the tin foil hat brigade to fill the void.
Worse, it gave the politicians an in too. For this example, we hop back to America. Just days before Garman's post went live, US Representative Jamie Raskin opened a congressional investigation into Amazon, Google, Meta and Oracle over their NDA practices.
Raskin found that Amazon's secrecy agreements prevented local officials from disclosing broadly defined proprietary or confidential information, leading to uncertainty about what could be shared.
Garman's post announces that the company "no longer uses non-disclosure agreements with government agencies." That's what we call a handbrake turn in the UK. And the admission of previous practices leaves a huge credibility chasm to jump.
Britain has the same problem
Here at home, we are building data centres at pace, and resistance is hardening. It's the new Nimby-ism (Nimby standing for Not in My Back Yard). And local housing developers were getting it in the neck, now it's the builders of the new AI-inspired grey monoliths that pepper the urban, suburban and post-industrial landscape.
Planning objections have emerged across the country, including a high-profile campaign near the village of North Ockendon in the London Borough of Havering. Opposition has reached West Kilbride on the Ayrshire coast. A study of a proposed development near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire found 62% of residents opposed, with 80% expressing concern, and four in five saying they felt their views received little or no consideration.
The government has changed planning rules so large data centre projects can bypass local authorities and go directly to the secretary of state as nationally significant infrastructure. The UK secretary of state for science has said the country needs at least 6 gigawatts of AI-capable data centre capacity by 2030, but according to Computer Weekly analysis, the UK is currently on course for only 4.9GW.
The gap is partly a planning problem. The planning problem is partly a communications failure.
Tech companies helped create the conditions for their own opposition. And to my point above about AWS's volte face.
Years of secrecy about what data centres consume and what communities get in return left a vacuum. Opposition groups filled it. Water depletion. Noise. Blighted green belt. Some of those concerns have merit. Many, as Garman's post argues at length, rest on bad information that went unchallenged for too long.
Amazon's Built Together programme commits more than $1 billion over five years to the US communities it operates in: free college courses, energy efficiency grants for homes and schools, flexible local funding tied to what residents say they actually want.
In the UK, data centres are a key part of critical national infrastructure, but at the local level their value is often poorly understood. Community benefits from UK developments are piecemeal, poorly communicated, and rarely tied to local priorities.
The tech industry got into this fight by refusing to make its case. Amazon has decided to start doing just that. But will it shift the debate here, or in the US, where it has become a mid-term campaigning point.
****Fact-check note
The description of Amazon's NDA use and the Raskin investigation is drawn from Data Center Dynamics (2 October 2026). The Oxfordshire defunct-company planning application is sourced from The Register (January 2022). The Didcot "Project Willow" story is from Data Center Dynamics. The Potters Bar opposition figures come from a University of Hertfordshire study (deposited August 2026). The 6GW government target and 4.9GW projection are drawn from a Computer Weekly analysis cited in multiple sources. Garman's post is published on aboutamazon.com and is the primary source throughout.
The claim that foreign governments are "seeding misinformation" about data centres is Garman's own allegation, not independently verified. It should not be presented as established fact. Consider flagging this as an Amazon assertion in the copy if you want greater editorial distance from it.
