AWS no longer requires NDAs for data center electricity contracts. That is the headline from AWS CEO Matt Garman’s recent response to community backlash, as reported by TechCrunch. The change signals a shift, but for developers building on AWS, the real question is whether this changes anything about how you evaluate a cloud provider's environmental footprint.
What actually changed
Garman stated that AWS has stopped using non-disclosure agreements in contracts with local utilities and data center operators. Previously, these NDAs prevented communities and local governments from knowing how much power a specific AWS data center consumed. The move follows years of criticism that cloud providers operate in an energy transparency vacuum.
Why this is still not enough
Dropping NDAs from utility contracts does not mean AWS is publishing per-datacenter energy data. It means the utility is no longer contractually gagged. The data may still be hard to find, unstandardized, or buried in public utility filings that vary by jurisdiction. For a developer who wants to know the carbon intensity of their workload running in us-east-1, the practical path to that number remains unclear.
What practitioners should watch for
If you are evaluating cloud providers on sustainability, look for the following concrete signals:
- Per-region or per-availability-zone energy usage reports published on a regular cadence
- Third-party audited carbon accounting (not just self-reported offsets)
- Real-time or near-real-time grid mix data for the regions you use
AWS’s own customer carbon footprint tool gives you a monthly estimate, but it is an average. For latency-sensitive or batch workloads that can shift to greener hours, averages are not actionable.
The bottom line
This is a step toward transparency, not a finished solution. AWS removed a contractual barrier, but the data itself is still not surfaced in a developer-ready way. Until per-zone energy data is available via API or dashboard, the trust gap remains.
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