Amazon will invest $1 billion in localities that allow for the construction of data centers as part of an effort to assuage concerns about their potentially adverse impacts on the towns.

Data centers are essentially warehouses full of hard storage devices that store information. Information stored on a cloud is still hosted on a server. In a blog post, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman sought to dispel concerns about their construction and to unveil the company's commitment to invest in local communities.

"With Built Together, Amazon will add more than $1 billion over the next five years to what we’re already doing—with communities in the driver’s seat to determine what’s most useful for them across education, job training, energy affordability, water and energy preservation, and local priorities," Garman said.

The investment comes as backlash to data centers has increasingly complicated efforts to build additional ones, leading some states to even impose outright moratoria on new facilities.

Ben Whedon is the Chief Political Correspondent at Just the News. Follow him on X.