OpenAI drops secrecy deals with local officials for its data centers

OpenAI has announced a set of commitments to communities that host its future US data center campuses, including a pledge not to use non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with public officials. The company also says it will bear the full cost of electricity and grid infrastructure for those sites and disclose environmental impacts.

The announcement lands in the same week as the US midterm elections, in which, as The Verge puts it, voters “resoundingly voiced their opposition to data center expansion”. For developers building on OpenAI’s models, the news is not about a new capability. It is about how the company intends to secure the physical capacity those models run on, at a moment when local resistance to that capacity is a political issue.

What OpenAI is committing to

According to coverage of the announcement, the commitments cover four areas: secrecy, power costs, jobs and local agreements.

• No NDAs with public officials. OpenAI says it will not use NDAs with public officials on its data center projects, allowing “only narrow protections covering legitimate security information, trade secrets, or proprietary or competitively sensitive information”. The Hindu describes this as a no-NDA commitment “subject to limited exceptions”.
• Paying for power and grid upgrades. OpenAI says it will pay “the full cost” of the electricity it uses and the “infrastructure needed to serve us”.
• Jobs and hiring disclosure. The company says it will publish the jobs it expects to create and report on hiring.
• Environmental disclosure. The Hindu reports that OpenAI pledges to disclose environmental impacts, and its headline also refers to a pledge of union engagement.
• A “local compact” per site. Every future “compute campus”, OpenAI’s term for its data centers, that the company owns and operates will have a “local compact” that includes the commitments and reflects “local priorities,” OpenAI says.

The pledges apply to future campuses in the United States, according to The Hindu. The Verge’s report specifies campuses the company owns and operates.

Why NDAs became the flashpoint

An NDA is a contract that bars the signers from sharing certain information. In data center deals, critics say, these agreements have been used to keep project details away from residents while developers negotiate with local governments. The Verge notes that many data center projects have come under scrutiny for relying on NDAs to hide discussions between developers and local officials.

The consumer advocacy group Public Citizen laid out the case against the practice in July. It said tech companies including Amazon, Google, Meta and xAI were “locking public officials behind non-disclosure agreements and concealing project details from communities until developers have secured permits, subsidies, and approvals”. It reported that in Virginia, 80% of localities with proposed or existing data centers have NDAs in place, and that in Tucson, Arizona, Amazon Web Services and developer Beale Infrastructure spent nearly two years negotiating a $3.6 billion, 290-acre data center campus behind NDAs. The same report cited polling that “seven in ten Americans oppose AI data centers in their communities”.

The Federation of American Scientists (FAS), which spent 2026 searching for executed agreements between data center developers and local governments, made a similar point: negotiations are often “conducted behind closed doors, protected by non-disclosure agreements,” leaving community members with “significantly fewer opportunities to influence the terms”.

Legislatures have started to act. Public Citizen counted over 300 state bills introduced in the first half of 2026 to regulate the buildout, and said lawmakers in at least ten states had introduced bills to restrict or ban NDAs in data center deals. One of its recommendations was that states “demand Big Tech and data center developers sign a ‘no NDA pledge’”.

How OpenAI’s pledge compares with Microsoft and Amazon

OpenAI is not the first large company to drop data center NDAs. In March 2026, Microsoft said it would cease using NDAs as a tool in data center site selection and development. “We’ve made the decision that being transparent with the communities where we operate or seek to operate is paramount,” the company said, as quoted by Rich Miller of Data Center Frontier. In October, Amazon announced it would no longer use NDAs with government agencies it works with on data center projects.

Company	When	NDA commitment as reported	Other commitments reported
Microsoft	March 2026	Stop using NDAs in data center site selection and development	Not covered in this announcement
Amazon	October 2026	No NDAs with government agencies on data center projects	Not covered in the reports reviewed
OpenAI	November 2026	No NDAs with public officials, with narrow exceptions	Full power and grid costs, job reporting, local compacts; environmental disclosure

The main difference is breadth. OpenAI bundles the NDA change with cost, jobs and disclosure commitments, and ties them to a per-site compact. Whether that bundle goes further in practice than its rivals’ pledges depends on the compacts’ actual terms, which the coverage does not detail.

The power-cost pledge builds on Stargate plans from January

The electricity commitment is not entirely new. In January 2026, OpenAI unveiled a plan aimed at limiting the impact of its Stargate data centers on local electricity costs, TechRadar reported, citing Bloomberg. Stargate is described as a $500 billion, multi-year program to build AI data centers across the United States for both training and inference workloads.

Under that plan, each Stargate site would operate under a community plan developed with input from residents and regulators, which could include funding new power and storage infrastructure directly or investing in generation and transmission. OpenAI claimed then that it would fully cover energy costs resulting from its operations rather than passing them on to residents or businesses. The new announcement turns that into a standing commitment for every future campus the company owns and operates, through the local compact.

The stakes for power grids are large. TechRadar noted reports that AI-driven data centers could nearly triple US electricity demand by 2035. Public Citizen said electricity demand in Virginia alone could triple by 2050, and that communities are being kept in the dark about deals that could raise their electricity bills for years.

What it means for builders

For developers and companies that depend on OpenAI’s API, the connection is indirect but real: model access depends on compute, and compute depends on data centers that local communities must approve. A Duke University report published in April cites a Data Center Watch estimate that upwards of $60 billion in data center projects were blocked or delayed over two years, and concludes that “social license to operate data centers is low in many communities”. The report’s authors caution that the figure is an indicator of political friction rather than a full accounting of every delay.

Commenters reacting to Microsoft’s NDA decision in March framed the issue in similar terms. Rich Miller wrote that “local resistance has become a huge business issue for hyperscalers who need AI capacity ASAP”. OpenAI’s pledge reads as an attempt to reduce that friction for its own buildout. Whether it shortens timelines is not something the sources can show yet.

For companies running their own infrastructure or negotiating colocation deals, the direction of travel is also worth noting. With Microsoft, Amazon and now OpenAI moving away from NDAs with officials, and state bills targeting the practice, confidentiality-first site negotiations look less likely to remain the norm.

Limits and open questions

Several questions remain open based on what has been reported.

• How narrow are the exceptions? OpenAI keeps protections for security information, trade secrets and “proprietary or competitively sensitive information”. How broadly that last category is read will determine how much actually becomes public.
• Which sites are covered? The compacts apply to future campuses OpenAI owns and operates. The reports do not say how the commitments apply to existing sites or to facilities built and run by partners.
• Are the compacts enforceable? The Duke report argues that community benefit agreements can be effective “if they are negotiated early, made specific, and backed by monitoring and enforcement”. FAS found only one fully executed and publicly posted community benefit agreement for data centers, in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and noted that it “appears to leave much of the substance to be decided later on”. OpenAI’s compacts will face the same test.
• What do “full cost” pledges include? OpenAI says it will pay for the electricity and infrastructure needed to serve its campuses, but the coverage does not explain how those costs will be calculated or verified with utilities and regulators.
• What else is in the announcement? The coverage reviewed here summarizes the commitments rather than reproducing OpenAI’s full text. Further details, including how campuses would behave when local grids are under strain, are not described in these reports.

Skepticism about timing is also part of the record. Responding to Microsoft’s March decision, one commenter asked why the change was “just now coming to fruition” after years of complaints. OpenAI’s announcement, coming directly after an election in which data centers were a campaign issue, is likely to draw similar questions.

What to watch next

• The first published local compact. The terms of an actual OpenAI compact, and whether it includes specific, enforceable figures on power, water and jobs, will show how much the pledge changes.
• Job and hiring reports. OpenAI says it will publish expected jobs and report on hiring. Public Citizen has criticized “grandiose job creation claims that don’t pan out” across the industry, so the first reports will be closely read.
• State legislation. With bills to restrict or ban data center NDAs introduced in at least ten states, voluntary pledges may soon sit alongside legal requirements.
• Other AI companies. Public Citizen named Google, Meta and xAI among companies using NDAs with officials. Whether they follow Microsoft, Amazon and OpenAI is the next marker for the industry.