Amazon says it will no longer use NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move by Microsoft earlier this year. Meanwhile, a wave of startups is betting consumers will let AI agents access their email, files and credit cards, while United, Apple and Amazon are putting up barriers to external agents.
Amazon says it will no longer use NDAs when negotiating data center deals with local governments, following a similar move by Microsoft earlier this year. The secrecy fueled community backlash against AI infrastructure, with hundreds of pause proposals or laws emerging from New York to San Francisco. TechCrunch’s Equity podcast also discusses why personal AI startups treat trust as the real product.
Ambrosia Energy CEO Ben Longmier and Bill Thayer, head of data center solutions at Bloom Energy, will sit down for a conversation titled “Where the AI infrastructure boom is creating winners” on the Smart Systems Stage at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026.
During LEAP 2026, AMD announced that AI infrastructure built with Cisco and HUMAIN, based on AMD Instinct MI355X GPUs, EPYC CPUs and Cisco networking equipment, is now in production service, with plans to add up to 250 megawatts starting from 2027 and the joint venture on track to reach up to 1 gigawatt by 2030.
AMD released its 2025-26 Corporate Responsibility Report, reviewing progress on 2020-2025 goals and looking ahead to 2030. From 2020 to 2025, renewable electricity rose from 22% to 58%, operational greenhouse gas emissions fell 30%, AI training and high-performance computing node energy efficiency improved 38x, and AMD systems on the Green500 list grew from 11 to 194; new targets include a 20x improvement in rack-scale AI energy efficiency from 2024 to 2030.