Global Tracker & NDA Silencing

Track active proposals

Honor the Earth maintains a real-time map of proposed and expanding data centers on and near Indigenous lands across the US, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

The map shows sites, developers, status, and—where public—environmental and community impact information. Click any marker to see what’s known.

The fact that you can’t click most of them and find complete information shows the NDA problem at work.

How NDAs circumvent tribal sovereignty

An NDA is a contract that forbids one party (the tribe) from disclosing terms to another party (the public, or the tribe’s own members).

When a corporation proposes a data center, it demands an NDA covering:

• Financial terms (upfront payments, annual revenue share, tax arrangements)
• Water quantity and usage (how much daily, where it comes from, whether it’s consumptive)
• Environmental impact assessments (what studies were done, what they found)
• Employment commitments (how many jobs, at what pay, for how long)
• Remediation or exit terms (what happens when the contract ends)

The corporation’s stated reason: this information is competitively sensitive. The real effect: elected tribal leaders can’t tell their members what was agreed.

A tribe’s member can ask: “Did we agree to give them 5 million gallons of water daily?” The elected official can’t answer. It’s under NDA.

“What did we get in return?” Same answer.

“Did we have a public process?” No. The NDA prevented it.

This isn’t a data center problem. It’s a sovereignty problem. Tribal sovereignty means tribal governance is accountable to tribal people. An NDA breaks that chain. The government makes a decision for the community without the community knowing the terms. This is the structure of colonialism: decisions made about Indigenous land without Indigenous voice, justified by confidentiality.

How elected officials get trapped

An NDA is signed by the tribal government, often by the chairman or a small executive team. Members of the tribal council might not know what was signed. The general membership definitely doesn’t.

Once signed, the official can’t disclose terms without violating the contract and exposing the tribe to legal liability. So even if they want to be transparent, they can’t. The NDA enforces silence.

This is different from a tribe choosing to keep something private. It’s a corporation forcing silence as a condition of negotiation. Tribes can choose not to sign, but if they want to negotiate at all, the NDA is the price of entry.

Many elected officials see this as standard business practice. “This is how contracts work.” What they’re missing is that this is how corporations prevent Indigenous self-determination. The silence is the extraction.

What’s known about active proposals

Information below comes from public records (environmental reviews, permitting filings, community reports) and media reporting. Much remains under NDA.

United States. Data center proposals and expansions are spreading across the country, with heavy concentration in:

• The Pacific Northwest (Washington, Oregon) — renewable energy proximity
• The Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Utah) — water access and land availability
• The Upper Midwest (Minnesota, Iowa) — renewable wind energy
• Appalachia (West Virginia, Kentucky) — power availability

Specific known proposals affecting or proposed near Indigenous lands include sites tracked on the Honor the Earth map (linked above). Many are in early stages. Some are actively permitting. A few are operational and expanding.

The pattern: new proposals typically emerge in counties or tribal jurisdictions where water stress is high and renewable energy is available. The developer identifies the site for resource access, then negotiates. The tribe sees a revenue opportunity. An NDA goes into a lawyer’s file. Community never hears about it until construction starts, or sometimes not at all.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Data center expansion is happening on Indigenous lands in all three countries. Many proposals are similarly shrouded in NDAs. Indigenous communities report learning about projects from environmental impacts (water quality changes, power infrastructure) rather than from transparent disclosure.

What you can do as a tribal government

Before signing anything:

1. Do you actually need this infrastructure? Run the audit in the Practical Reduction section. Most tribes don’t.
2. If you’re negotiating, refuse the NDA on the scope of community disclosure. Propose: “NDA protects legitimate business information (contractor pricing, specific revenue models), but community impact and terms are disclosed to tribal membership before final approval.”
3. If they won’t negotiate on that point, it signals that they’re relying on silence to close the deal. Walk away. Any corporation that needs secrecy to make a deal is structuring extraction, not partnership.
4. Require a community vote before signature. Make it binding. This is non-negotiable.
5. Get third-party environmental review. Don’t use the developer’s study. Hire independent consultants (or work with groups like Honor the Earth or tribal environmental offices) to assess water impact, power draw, climate effects.
6. Set clear exit terms. What happens to the land and infrastructure when the contract ends? Twenty years from now, does the tribe inherit a remediated site or an orphaned data center?

If you’ve already signed:

Talk to the Native American Rights Fund (NARF) or your tribal attorney about what an NDA actually binds. Sometimes there’s room to share with tribal members what the impacts are, even if you can’t share specific financial terms. Sometimes you can renegotiate. Sometimes you can set a hard line that the next phase requires community vote.

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