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Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, Heavily Invested in AI, Leads Push for Data Centers on Public Lands

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who is heavily invested in the AI industry, is leading the charge to allow tech companies to build data centers on the public lands he oversees. Other Trump administration officials also have financial ties t

AI.info Team · Written with AI · fact-checked · 2026-11-06

Burgum’s AI investments and federal role

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is leading the charge to allow tech companies to build data centers on the public lands he oversees. Much of his wealth is held in Arthur Ventures, an investment firm he co-founded, according to his 2026 financial disclosure form. Between $18.1 million and $64.4 million of those investments are in AI companies, according to an analysis of the companies’ marketing materials shared with ProPublica by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks.

Save Our Parks’ analysis showed that, in the year before joining the administration, when he was North Dakota’s governor, Burgum made between $2.1 million and $11 million in capital gains from AI-related investments. In 2025, he sold millions of dollars of stocks and equity in AI companies, bringing in capital gains worth between $2.5 million and $15.1 million. In the ethics agreement Burgum signed as part of his Senate confirmation, he agreed to resign from his positions at Arthur Ventures but not give up his financial interests there.

Ethics rules and the appearance of a conflict

A U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement: “Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations. Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.” Federal officials’ activities are governed by a criminal statute that sets a high burden of proof for potential wrongdoing, ethics professors and lawyers told ProPublica, and they said Burgum’s investments appear to be acceptable under this law. Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group, said ethics rules “instruct officials not to work on anything that would create the appearance of a conflict of interest.”

Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, agreed that Burgum should avoid making decisions benefiting an industry in which he is heavily invested. “I, as the ethics lawyer, would insist he stay away from it,” Painter said.

The current administration offers federally managed public lands for data centers

A little-noticed U.S. Geological Survey report released earlier this year found that at least 91.3 million acres of public lands managed by the Interior Department could potentially host data centers. Burgum met with representatives of Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet more than 20 times from January through November 2025, according to a compilation of his schedules shared with ProPublica by public interest watchdog group Public Citizen. In October, several Democratic senators wrote to Burgum: “We demand that you immediately cease all efforts to hijack public lands for the development of data centers, and urge you to provide full transparency on your role in the DOI’s efforts to site data centers.”

Pearce and Boren have financial ties to AI

Steve Pearce, director of the Bureau of Land Management, owned stock in Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, Apple, Alphabet and other AI-focused companies, according to his most recent publicly available financial disclosure, signed in October 2025. Pearce also is invested in Titan Development, a real estate company that has managed several land acquisitions for data centers in the Southwest; he pledged to divest many of his AI investments, but not Titan. The BLM is reviewing permit applications for about 15 data centers and 17 associated infrastructure projects, including nuclear power plants and transmission wires, in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.

The project that was to be the first data center on BLM land, near Boulder City in southern Nevada, had earned a permit to build a solar plant before changing its plans; the BLM approved the change in June without studying the potential environmental implications, and an Interior Department appeals board has since paused the project, sending it back to the agency for further review. An Interior Department spokesperson said the main charge for data centers on public land appears set to be an “annual fair-market-value rent.”

AI interests reach other agencies

Michael Boren first served as acting assistant secretary of the Interior Department before transitioning to U.S. Department of Agriculture undersecretary, where he oversees the Forest Service. Among his many investments in AI companies, he reported between about $1.5 million and $6.1 million in financial interests in Elon Musk’s xAI, which has since been acquired by SpaceX. He also has up to $500,000 invested in Valar Atomics, which is pushing to build a data center complex called Project Beehive on thousands of acres of BLM land in Utah, complete with more than 450 small nuclear plants to power it. Lee Zeldin, whom President Donald Trump appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency, bought and sold up to $15,000 worth of shares of Datavault AI in May 2025.

In July, the EPA under Zeldin proposed ending a requirement that states gather public feedback as they consider air permits for certain facilities, including data centers. In October, Democratic senators asked Zeldin to withdraw the proposed rule: “The federal government should encourage transparency and public engagement around these projects, not make it easier to shroud their construction in secrecy,” they wrote.