Editor's note: This story was substantially revised on the evening of Sept. 18 after the Wire obtained the full text of the agreement. An earlier version, drawn from secondhand coverage, gave the contract's date as April 4, 2025 and stated that treated wastewater would be routed back to the Ridgeland site for reuse. The agreement's effective date is March 18, 2025, and it contains no reuse provision; that arrangement belongs to Amazon's separate Canton campus. The Wire regrets the errors. The document-based account follows.

The contract governing water for Amazon's Ridgeland data center is 45 pages long, marked Amazon Confidential on every one of them, and effective March 18, 2025. It is not a two-party deal between a company and a city. It is a three-party agreement among Amazon Data Services, the City of Ridgeland, and the Madison County Economic Development Authority, layered on top of a January 2024 cooperation agreement with the State of Mississippi that commits up to $215 million in state infrastructure money to Amazon's Mississippi projects. The Mississippi Free Press obtained it through a public records request this week. The Wire has now read all of it, and the version below is drawn from the text, not from anyone's summary of it.

The number that has traveled is 3.67 million gallons a day. In the contract it appears in Exhibit 5 as the peak-day rate for cooling water, arriving in two phases: 2.1 million gallons a day available by January 2026, the full 3.67 million by March 2028. On top of that, 30,000 gallons a day of potable water for the buildings themselves. The exhibit that contains these figures is stamped as trade secret and exempt from the Mississippi Public Records Act until Amazon has been given written notice and 21 days to seek a protective order in chancery court. The public was never meant to see it without a fight.

What makes the peak figure meaningful is the arithmetic the city put beside it. In its own capacity tables, dated February 2025, Ridgeland lists its entire peak-day demand, every home, school, restaurant and business in a city of 25,000, at 4.5 million gallons. Amazon's peak, at 3.67 million, is 82 percent of that. Against the city's seven existing wells, rated at just over 5 million gallons a day on the 12-hour operating basis the State Department of Health uses, Amazon's peak is 73 percent. Only after two new Amazon-funded wells come online in 2028 does the system's rated capacity reach about 11 million gallons, with Ridgeland and Amazon together leaving a reserve of roughly 2.9 million. The tables carry a warning from the state in a footnote: a public water system that serves customers beyond its design capacity is in violation of the Safe Drinking Water Act and is prohibited from adding customers until it builds its way out.

Amazon's own words on how much of that capacity it expects to use are also in the contract, in a paragraph appended to the trade-secret exhibit. The flow rates, it says, represent peak use on the hottest days of the hottest year. The facility uses outside air for cooling about 91 percent of the year and water about 9 percent. Annual use is expected to be 93 million gallons, which the company describes as less than the annual use of 843 households, or 2 percent of the households in Madison County. That is the figure officials have repeated for a year. It is a projection. Nothing in the 45 pages converts it into a limit, a penalty, or a reporting obligation to anyone but the meter reader.

The contract is precise about what happens when water is short, and the precision runs in one direction. If Ridgeland fails to deliver Amazon's full service for more than 24 hours for any reason other than a defined force majeure event, the city must provide substitute water at its own cost, and if it cannot, Amazon may arrange its own supply and the city must give it access to the infrastructure to do so. There is no corresponding clause for the other 25,000 customers. The words drought and shortage do not appear as a priority rule. On the hot afternoon that matters, the document says who is owed water. It does not say who is owed it first.

Now the Jackson part, which the contract states plainly. Wastewater generated by the project, the agreement says, will be discharged into a new city gravity sewer main and conveyed to the interceptor system operated by the City of Jackson, an interim third-party receiver or manager, or as may otherwise be ordered by a court of competent jurisdiction. That definition, drafted in early 2025, is a description of JXN Water and the federal court that put it in charge. The pipe itself is 2,125 feet of gravity sewer along West County Line Road, connecting the site to Jackson's West Bank interceptor at Hanging Moss Creek, and it was scheduled to be operational on January 1 of this year, paid for with $7.55 million of the state's infrastructure money through the county development authority.

The volume on the sewer side is its own headline. Exhibit 5 lists peak wastewater discharge at 1,840,000 gallons a day of industrial cooling water plus 30,000 gallons of domestic sewage. Nearly 1.9 million gallons a day, on peak days, entering a Jackson collection system that has been under a federal consent decree for over a decade and that JXN Water is still rebuilding. The contract's only control on that flow is a sentence: Amazon will release wastewater at a rate that complies with the Jackson Treatment System's rate of acceptance. Jackson is not a party to the agreement. Its rate of acceptance is referenced; its consent is not.

Money moves in three streams, and the contract itemizes each. Amazon provides up to $33.7 million in Company Funds for two new 1,500-gallon-per-minute wells at South Livingston and Colony Park Boulevard, at $8 million and $8.8 million, a million-gallon tank at Colony Park at $5 million, a $6.7 million elevated tank for the western system, a sewer extension to a new fire station, and connecting mains. The county authority spends $7.55 million of state money on the sewer connection to Jackson, metering stations, a water loop and a second million-gallon tank. Ridgeland spends $12,456,334 of its own funds on a well, an elevated tank and a distribution line at Highland Colony. Amazon pays for water and sewer service at Ridgeland's published rates, the same schedule a household is on, and the contract requires that any future rate change be applied uniformly and without discrimination across the customer class.

Then there is the clause that will shape Ridgeland's growth for a generation, and it was not in any of the coverage. Section 1.5 creates a Latecomer Connection Charge. For 20 years, any new customer with a projected peak demand of 300,000 gallons a day or more that connects to Amazon-funded infrastructure must pay a fee, calculated by formula against Amazon's $23.3 million contribution, and the city must forward the full amount to Amazon within 30 days of receiving it. The contract's own worked example prices a 500,000-gallon-a-day development at $302,900, payable in effect to Amazon. The company did not buy Ridgeland's water system. It bought the right to be reimbursed by whoever comes next.

The term is 25 years, renewing automatically for three additional five-year periods unless Amazon, and only Amazon, gives 90 days' notice that it does not wish to continue. Forty years, at the company's option. Amazon may also walk away during construction on 90 days' notice, owing only the documented costs incurred to that date. The city and the county authority commit to events of default that include failing to deliver service by the contract dates, with damages limited to direct losses on all sides. The county authority may not issue a press release about the project without Amazon's consent; Amazon may issue any statement it likes, in its sole discretion. Two nondisclosure agreements, with Ridgeland in June 2023 and with the county authority in April 2023, predate the public announcement of the project by many months.

None of this makes the Ridgeland deal unusual by the standards of the industry, and that is precisely the point for Jackson. This is what a negotiated water agreement with a hyperscale operator looks like in Mississippi in 2025: capacity set at the hottest day of the hottest year, an estimate with no teeth, a substitute-supply guarantee that runs to the company, a downstream city that is named in the document but not at the table, and a reimbursement scheme that ties the next 20 years of local development to the first customer's checkbook. Ridgeland wanted the deal and got these terms. A city that wanted it less could reasonably ask for more.

Jackson's council is drafting its ordinance with the moratorium clock running, and this document is the most useful exhibit it will get. The clauses to write are the ones missing here: a withdrawal cap set at the stated estimate, not the system's ceiling, with penalties above it; metered monthly usage reported publicly, not just to the utility; a shortage rule that puts residential customers first when the wells are strained; sewer treatment priced to a broken system's real costs; and a seat for JXN Water at any table where a neighbor's contract sends millions of gallons a day into Jackson's pipes. The Ridgeland agreement names Jackson's sewer system in its definitions. The next one should have to ask.