Your Town Signed an NDA About the Data Center. You Didn't.

Wait — can a city even sign an NDA?

My first assumption was that the NDA must be some exotic legal instrument. It's usually just a few pages. And cities sign them constantly — in Virginia, home to more data centers than anywhere on Earth, roughly eight in ten localities with a project have one in place.

But a contracts law professor in Oklahoma said something that reframed the whole thing for me: where you want to put your data center is not a trade secret. How you cool a server hall might be. Which cornfield you're buying is a business plan, and a business plan doesn't get legal protection from the people who live next to the cornfield.

The deeper I read, the shakier these agreements looked. Oklahoma's own law says a public body can't contract its way around the state's Open Records Act, and that principle holds in most states: your mayor can promise to keep quiet, but the mayor can't promise the law will. Some NDAs even declare that their own existence is confidential — which tells you the lawyers who drafted them saw the records requests coming.

The one that stopped me cold was in Bessemer, Alabama. The agreement there told city officials to destroy their own notes about the project whenever the developer asked — grown elected officials, instructed to shred their homework. When environmental lawyers threatened to sue, the city handed the whole agreement over. It had been a public record the entire time.

The move: request the NDA itself, first

The pattern in every case that worked is the same. Somebody filed a public records request for the NDA itself — and the document meant to hide the deal became the document that exposed it. In Beloit, Wisconsin, a nonprofit newsroom did exactly that and learned the city had been negotiating for more than a year before anyone said a word in public.

So the play looks like this. Every state has a records law; the name varies (public records act, right-to-know law, sunshine law), but the mechanism is the same. You email the city or county clerk and describe what you want. Describe it by topic, because the company is probably hiding behind a code name — Bessemer's deal was 'Project Marvel' — so ask for any nondisclosure or confidentiality agreements related to data center or large-load development, plus development agreements, utility capacity studies, and correspondence with the developer or its site consultants. A date range keeps it from getting thrown back as too broad.

Then expect a denial. The standard one claims 'trade secret.' What I didn't know: in most states the burden of proving that sits on the government, and the definition is strict. A water bill isn't a formula. A land deal isn't an invention.

And a denial isn't the end — it's the beginning of the appeal, which is where requesters keep winning. In Oregon, a newspaper reporter appealed a city's denial to the county district attorney, who ruled the city hadn't proven anything was secret and ordered the records out. Your state has some version of that referee: an open-records office, the attorney general, or a judge.

What happened when towns fought back — and lost

The Dalles, Oregon is the case I keep coming back to, because the town fought disclosure about as hard as a town can. A reporter asked how much water Google's data centers were using. The city claimed trade secret. The DA ordered the records released. And then the city sued its own local newspaper's reporter to keep the number hidden — with Google initially agreeing to cover the city's legal bills.

After more than a year, they gave up. The settlement released years of water data, plus every year going forward, and the number the whole fight was about turned out to be this: the data centers were drinking nearly a third of the entire town's water. Every third glass, roughly, going to the servers. A number like that explains the secrecy better than any trade-secret argument ever did.

And the pressure keeps working upstream. In Port Washington, Wisconsin, a court ruled the city broke the records law by withholding email attachments about an OpenAI-linked campus. A growing list of states has introduced bills to restrict or ban these NDAs outright. And this spring Microsoft — the first big tech company to blink — announced it will stop requiring NDAs from local governments anywhere in the world and unwind the ones it already has. Companies don't abandon a tool that's working quietly. They abandon a tool that's started to embarrass them.

The part I still can't see

What I couldn't pin down is the thing that bugs me most: nobody tracks how many of these agreements exist. There's no registry, no map, no disclosure requirement in most states. Every single one that's come to light so far came out the same way — one resident, one reporter, or one nonprofit filed a request and refused to take 'confidential' for an answer.

That's the actual answer to the question I started with. Yes, a records request can pry the deal loose. The NDA binds your officials' mouths, but it doesn't bind the filing cabinet, and it was never allowed to bind the law.

I'm pulling on the rest of this thread — who actually pays for the power behind these campuses, and why your electric bill is part of a deal you never signed — over on the Byte Bungalow YouTube channel. Watch the videos and subscribe if you want the next rabbit hole as I dig it. In the meantime, if your town has gone quiet about a 'project' with a strange code name, remember the clerk's email address is public too.

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