Amazon announced Built Together on October 2, 2026, a program that adds more than $1 billion over five years for the US communities where it operates data centers. According to Amazon’s announcement, the money goes to education, job training, energy affordability and water preservation, and each community decides which of those matters most to it.
Amazon says the new money comes on top of what it already spends locally: over the past three years it has contributed more than $1 billion to US communities where it has a meaningful data center presence.
On this page
What the program funds
Amazon puts five-year targets on each part of the program, as set out on the Built Together page:
| Area | Amazon’s five-year target |
|---|---|
| Education | Connect more than 300,000 students to free degree access, covering community college costs that financial aid does not |
| Job training | Train 100,000 learners for high-skilled jobs |
| Energy upgrades | More than 30,000 homes and more than 300 schools and buildings, which Amazon estimates will cut their energy costs by 20 to 40 percent |
| Local priorities | Flexible grants that communities direct themselves |
Water
The announcement also restates Amazon’s water goal for its data centers. The company says it is 75% of the way to being water positive by 2030, meaning it returns more water to communities than its data center operations use. Amazon says it has contracted more than 65 water projects near its operations worldwide that are expected to return more than 8 billion gallons a year, which it puts at more than double the water its data centers used in 2025.
Why it matters for AI infrastructure
Built Together is not a new campus or a capacity figure. It is a hyperscaler putting a dollar figure on what it will spend in the towns around its data center build-out, and two of its parts, home and building energy upgrades and water projects, address electricity costs and water use directly. The program covers the United States only; the targets are Amazon’s own estimates over the five years that start with this announcement.
Amazon’s power arrangements for its data centers show up in other announcements, such as the 20-year Calvert Cliffs nuclear agreement with Constellation signed on September 30. AI data-center projects from Amazon and others, with owners, capacity and status, are logged in the AI data centers tracker, and new projects and power deals are in AI data center news.
