A grant cannot settle a dispute about who bears the costs of a data centre. On 2 October, Amazon Web Services chief executive Matt Garman announced Built Together, under which Amazon says it will spend more than $1 billion over five years in US communities where it builds and operates data centres, GeekWire reported. The money is intended for community college, job training, energy upgrades and projects chosen locally. Those may be useful things to fund. They are also different from resolving a dispute over a proposed facility.
I think Amazon is treating local opposition principally as a problem of benefits and persuasion, when much of it concerns decisions made before a community gets to choose a benefit. Residents want to know how much water a facility will use, whether the electricity system can serve it without passing costs to other customers, and what control they retain over the land beside their homes. Training places cannot answer those questions. Neither can an argument about national AI leadership determine what a particular town should permit.
Amazon’s pledge beside its building plans
Scale matters here because a community fund and a construction programme do different jobs. Amazon projects about $220 billion in capital expenses this year, largely for data centres and chips, GeekWire reported. The company says the new community spending comes on top of money it has already given to places where it operates. I do not doubt that a college course or an upgraded school building can benefit its recipients. I doubt that spending on them gives residents any more control over a facility’s water demand, power supply or siting.
The strongest case for Amazon is more serious than a complaint about its grant budget. Garman says opposition is fuelled by “misinformation and outright lies”, according to GeekWire. Amazon says it will stop using nondisclosure agreements with government agencies on data-centre projects, publish energy and water use annually, install lower-emission backup generators at new sites and pay enough for power to prevent local electricity bills from rising. Those are commitments directed at some of the concerns residents raise. A developer willing to publish operating data and accept responsibility for power costs has gone further than one offering only a donation.
But the commitments need to meet the decision they are supposed to inform. Annual figures can help a community judge an operating facility. A promise about bills can be tested against the terms on which power is supplied. For someone deciding whether to accept a proposal, the useful questions come earlier: what is being requested, what protections will govern it, and who can enforce them? I would welcome evidence that Amazon’s undertakings are written into arrangements residents and public authorities can examine before approval. That would make them a basis for trust rather than an appeal for it.
Michigan’s water concerns are local
Opposition is broad enough to deserve more than a rebuttal to the worst claims made against data centres. At least 75 projects were blocked or delayed in the first three months of 2026, according to Data Center Watch. An Economist/YouGov poll found that 63% of Americans would oppose a data centre in their community. Neither measure tells us whether each disputed project would have harmed its neighbours. They do tell us why winning an argument about data centres in general will not secure consent for an individual site.
In Michigan, a University of Michigan survey found that 60% of local government leaders expected data centres to harm the state’s fresh water supply, The Michigan Independent reported. The same survey found that a majority expected a negative effect on ratepayers’ utility bills. These are forecasts by officials, rather than measurements of what a particular Amazon facility has done. Yet they identify matters that local authorities have a responsibility to examine. Calling concern mistaken cannot substitute for giving those authorities the project-specific information and enforceable terms needed to make their own judgement.
The objection also crosses a political divide. Michigan Senate candidates Mike Rogers and Abdul El-Sayed both support some form of pause on data-centre development, though their positions differ, WCMU reported. Their agreement does not make every proposed moratorium wise. It does make it harder to explain resistance as the product of a single faction hostile to AI. People who disagree about much else can still want time to establish rules for water, bills and public access to development agreements.
Amazon meets a zoning dispute in Loudoun
Amazon’s proposal at George Washington University’s former Loudoun campus puts the distinction between generosity and permission into focus. Residents raised concerns about generator emissions, noise and water use at a town hall, while county officials pursued ways to oppose the planned data centres through zoning, Loudoun Now reported. This is a disagreement over the use of a particular property and the county’s authority to decide that use. A benefit offered elsewhere in the community may be welcome without changing anyone’s view of the site.
I read Built Together as an attempt to make the costs and benefits of construction more visible to prospective hosts. That is a reasonable ambition. The mistake would be to assume that more visible benefits can replace public scrutiny of the costs, or that opposition must fade once Amazon has answered the claims it considers false. A town can value jobs and training, accept that computing infrastructure is useful, and still reject a facility under the terms offered to it. Its decision need not be an error to be corrected by a better account of the national interest.
Amazon should put its water and power commitments, projected site demands and proposed protections before local authorities and residents while they can still affect a decision. Those authorities should test the commitments through the approvals and agreements they control, rather than treating community spending as compensation agreed in advance. I would revise my view of Built Together if communities examining actual Amazon proposals could verify those protections, enforce the terms on bills and resource use, and choose whether the facilities proceed.
