OpenAI is stepping back from NDAs for data center projects

Secrecy has been part of the data-center playbook — developers and local officials talking behind NDAs while neighbors learn late about power, water, and land deals. That model just took a political hit.

OpenAI announced it will not use non-disclosure agreements with public officials on data-center projects, allowing only narrow protections for security information, trade secrets, or competitively sensitive material. Amazon made a similar NDA retreat with government agencies in October. OpenAI also pledged to pay the full cost of the electricity and infrastructure that serves it, publish expected jobs and hiring reports, and attach a "local compact" reflecting local priorities to every future compute campus it owns and operates.

This is damage control and product strategy at once: keep building, but stop looking like the deal happens in a locked room.

We're treating this as OpenAI reading the room after voters said no to unconstrained expansion. The company already rebranded data centers as "compute campuses." Now it is putting process promises on paper — no NDAs with public officials, full freight on power and infrastructure, job transparency, local compacts.

That is progress relative to the opacity that fueled backlash. It is not a promise to build less. Paying full electricity cost matters if it means communities are not subsidizing AI load through residential rates; it matters less if "full cost" still leaves grid upgrades and water fights for someone else to absorb. Local compacts will be judged by what is in them, not by the press release that invents the phrase.

I'm glad Amazon moved first on government NDAs and OpenAI is following. Useful AI still needs watts. Those watts still need a public that believes the bargain. The downside if this is theater: officials keep quiet through other channels, projects still surprise towns, and protest hardens — as Amsterdam showed the same day at a Microsoft site. The upside if the commitments are real: faster honest permitting, fewer ambush hearings, and a template other hyperscalers have to match.

Midterm results this week amplified local opposition to data-center growth. Meta separately warned that election backlash could make AI expansion harder. OpenAI's language of compute campuses is part of a broader attempt to reframe industrial AI buildout as community infrastructure.