In the United States, data center projects are often negotiated in secrecy, using code names, shell companies registered in Delaware, and clauses limiting the communication of public documents. In March 2025, in Mason County, northeast of Kentucky, Timothy Grosser and his son Andy received three men around a table offering $10 million for their 250-acre farm, thirty-five times the price paid in 1988. One of the visitors represented a Fortune 100 company interested in industrial development but refused to specify the company, its name, or even his own name, instead presenting a non-disclosure agreement. Timothy Grosser refused to sign, stating, "I won't sell my farm at any price." Five months later, local officials announced in a public meeting that the county was being studied for a data center installation, with eighteen of twenty property owners having already signed purchase agreements. In Boyce, Louisiana, a town of about a thousand inhabitants, excavators are clearing the ground for a future data center campus on 300 acres. Beekeeper Foster Hensel expressed concerns about his bills, the environment of his hives, and the lack of available information, quoting Shakespeare: "there is something rotten in the state of Denmark." Real estate agent Mason McCallister noted that "everyone remains silent. If it was so good for the community, they would be shouting it from the rooftops." Negotiations between the Texas-based company Applied Digital and local officials were covered by non-disclosure agreements. Shannon McManus, a former sheriff's deputy, mentioned rumors at the end of 2024 but never received a response, stating, "The information should have been available before decisions were made, not after." The project, now named Delta Forge 1, is expected to be a $3.6 billion campus drawing 300 megawatts from the electrical grid in its first phase. The industrial development council approved the agreement in a public session on April 23 with little discussion. Data centers consumed about 4.4% of American electricity in 2023, compared to less than 2% in 2018, according to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The same report projects a range of 6.7 to 12% in 2028. The 300 megawatts of the first phase of the Boyce campus correspond to the consumption of about 200,000 American households on a summer day, according to data from the federal energy information agency. According to the Congressional Research Service, a site is classified as hyperscale if it houses at least 5,000 servers, occupies at least 10,000 square feet, and draws more than 100 megawatts from the grid, which is enough to cover the needs of about 80,000 American households. Documents obtained by Gulf States Newsroom and Type Investigations show that at least five state senators, the parish assessor, and all members of the development council had signed non-disclosure agreements. These contracts referred to the project under two code names, "Project Lightning" and "Project Pixel," and prohibited the communication of information to the public. These requests have allowed the identification of at least 54 such agreements signed by Louisiana officials since early 2024, all projects combined. A review of more than thirty projects in fourteen states by NBC News shows that the practice is not a local exception, with most cases involving local officials signing non-disclosure agreements and negotiating with what appears to be shell companies. Eric Bonds, a sociologist at Mary Washington University, has cataloged non-disclosure agreements in 25 of the 31 projects studied in Virginia, estimating this count to be lower than the reality. In Beaver Dam, Wisconsin, the city's development agency signed an agreement in December 2023 not with Meta, but with an unknown entity, Balloonist LLC. The document mentioned only a "project," without the word data center or the name of the group, and prohibited revealing even the existence of the discussions. Meta confirmed its involvement only in December 2025, two years later. In Texas, the same group negotiated its tax breaks in Fort Worth and El Paso under the names Winner LLC and Wurldwide LLC, both registered in Delaware, where the identity of the owners is not public, as established by the Texas Tribune. According to documents obtained by NBC News, these agreements can sometimes extend for years beyond the date of the initial proposal, and many include a clause requiring the community to restrict as much as the law allows the communication of administrative documents, as well as to notify the company first so that it has a reasonable opportunity to prevent disclosure. In other words, the private contract organizes the community's response to public document access requests. Companies and development agencies advance three distinct justifications for these NDAs: stock market law, land prices, and competition. A company like Applied Digital, being listed, considers a new campus project non-public privileged information. Its CEO, Wes Cummins, admits, "I would very much like to be able to do without NDAs, because it gives people an impression of backroom dealing." He explains that the agreement mainly protects the local official, often unfamiliar with these rules, from an unintentional violation of insider trading regulations. The second justification relates to land prices, with Neila Wilson, regional director of engineering and data center operations at Visa, explaining that "the moment the land seller knows who will be located there, the price jumps exponentially." The third is competition, as Dan Diorio, vice president of public policy at the Data Center Coalition, states that "if your competitors know that you are looking at such a piece of land, it can change the land price, it can change the course of the project." Tracy Hester, an environmental law professor at the University of Houston, adds that data centers are not more secret than another large private industry, and the shale gas precedent of the 2010s followed the same trajectory before the sector conceded the publication of the chemicals used. However, in several states, these agreements are not enforceable against the right of access to public documents. In Pennsylvania, Larry Padora, president of the Schuylkill County commissioners' board, states that his legal council had warned him: "Our legal council explained that NDAs are communicable under the right of access. So signing them serves no purpose." He signed them anyway, noting that the only confidential information learned was the name of the data center's final client: Amazon. David Cuillier, director of the Brechner Freedom of Information Project, University of Florida, states, "Information is power. And these people are powerful, and want to make a lot of money." A significant portion of the data center projects recorded exist only on paper, with developers submitting connection requests to multiple network operators simultaneously for the same project, without financial commitment, and only building in the best location. Wood Mackenzie estimates that only about 28% of the 1,066 gigawatts requested in the United States will materialize. At the state level, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro indicated in August that more than a hundred data center projects were under discussion in his state, and that only five had the necessary permits to operate, describing the others as speculative, lacking a detailed plan, financing, electricity access, or identified client. Economist Severin Borenstein of the University of Berkeley recalls a precedent: at the end of the 1990s, electricity consumption predictions related to the Internet had largely exceeded reality, the usage having been multiplied by twenty when the consumption had not quite doubled. Those that do succeed now find themselves facing informed residents, and often organized even before the submission of permits. John Estill, county prosecutor of Mason County, a signatory of a non-disclosure agreement, summarized, "Either you want your officials to court companies and seek development, or not. And if you do, then NDAs unfortunately are part of the landscape."