On Friday, Amazon committed to donating more than $1 billion over the next five years to communities neighboring data centers.
In a press release, Amazon Web Services’ CEO Matt Garman said that communities would decide how to prioritize funds across “education, job training, energy affordability, water, and energy preservation, and local priorities.”
Laying out other community commitments, Amazon also promised to ensure data centers wouldn’t increase power bills or wipe out local water supplies. Regarding the latter, Amazon promised to be “water positive” by 2030, while claiming that 75 percent of projects have already met this goal.
Rolling out these commitments, Amazon seemed bent on convincing Americans that the swelling data center backlash is based on lies. Echoing Donald Trump’s claims that foreign disinformation campaigns are fueling widespread protests, Garman urged that calls for data moratoriums must end or else American frontier AI might fall behind China’s.
According to Garman, US rivals are trying to “trick us into slowing down,” and Amazon’s commitments are meant to reassure Americans that everything’s okay and that we should instead plow ahead, as Trump endlessly advocates.
However, advocates at Stand.Earth—a global nonprofit that’s been fighting for environmental protections in communities hosting data centers—told Ars that Amazon is the one being “misleading” by spreading “corporate propaganda.” Seemingly in crisis mode as billions of dollars in data center projects have been blocked nationwide, Amazon’s promised donations represent “a flailing attempt at damage control for the harm its data center build-out has already caused,” Stand.Earth said.
Most problematic, Stand.Earth suggested, is Amazon’s plan to back a power plant that experts expect will become the largest source of US climate pollution. Glaringly, Amazon’s data center commitments don’t mention the power plant and scarcely address pollution, apart from promising to exclusively rely on back-up generators that use the lowest possible emissions.