Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services, wrote a long text with one goal: to convince Americans that data centres are good news for the places where they spring up. The most important thing in the whole text is a single sentence: "We no longer use confidentiality agreements with the government agencies we work with on our projects." Translated from corporate speak: until now they did.

Secrecy is precisely at the heart of the resistance. Environmental activist Erin Brockovich recently said the most common complaint she hears about data centres is the lack of transparency, following a repeating pattern: the project is announced after the permits are already secured, the investors don't return calls, and local officials signed confidentiality agreements before the neighbours even learned something was being planned. New York has already introduced a one-year moratorium on permits for large data centres, and according to Garman himself, more than 100 moratoriums are currently under consideration across the US.

His answer is the classic one: fear. "If these measures are adopted, the US could write its own losing ticket in this race, and the consequences would last for generations," Garman wrote. He then set out to demolish four "myths": that data centres use too much water, that they push up electricity prices, that they pollute and that they bring communities nothing.

On water he cited a report by Amazon itself: data centres' direct consumption was only 0.5% of industrial water use in the US, "several orders of magnitude less than golf courses and almond growing". Except that such figures skip the water used to produce electricity and chips. Scientists are calling for independent measurements, since no federal or state regulation obliges tech companies to report how they consume. When a company measures itself and publishes its own figure, how much does that "0.5%" weigh?

On electricity, Garman claims prices rose only in some states with many data centres, while in others they fell or grew more slowly, and where they are rising, the culprit was an old grid that wasn't invested in on time. An independent watchdog recently said something completely different: data centres are the main culprit behind a price rise of 76% in one year on the largest power grid in the US.

Most telling is the part on pollution, an issue over which the NAACP is already suing Elon Musk's SpaceX/xAI. Garman complains that critics look at the maximum the permits allow. And the maximum is this: a planned Amazon data centre in Texas has a permit to emit 33 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year, more than any power plant in the US. "The truth is that data centre generators almost never run," he writes, "they are idle 99.9% of the time", meaning they run about ten hours a year, mostly for mandatory testing. If they really almost never run, why do they need a permit bigger than any American power plant's?

The last "myth" is communities: over the past three years Amazon has invested "more than a billion dollars" (around 870 million euros) in the places where it has a significant presence. Will that be enough? Dario Amodei, the CEO of Anthropic, recently said that resistance to artificial intelligence is "essentially a crisis of trust", in which people assume governments and tech companies are constantly coming up with new ways to cheat them. Writer Jasmine Sun noted that opponents of data centres usually answer the companies' arguments briefly: "We don't trust them."

Macedonia already has its own small version of the same story. In Pehchevo, councillors of the ruling VMRO-DPMNE voted against rezoning land for a data centre planned by their own government, because nobody had shown them a project, a study or a calculation of how many megawatts the facility will consume. Pehchevo is not Texas, but the question it raises is the same: why are the neighbours always the last to know?