The Trump administration has likened the need to build out the nation’s artificial intelligence infrastructure to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb.
The White House’s point person on the effort, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has spoken of the “AI arms race” with China as an existential issue for the nation. “AI is manufacturing intelligence, and, if we don’t manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, it affects every job, every company and every industry,” he said during his Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025.
But advancing the administration’s AI objectives also could benefit Burgum’s own finances.
Much of his wealth is held in Arthur Ventures, an investment firm he co-founded, according to his 2026 financial disclosure form, which has not been previously reported. 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. (Government financial disclosure forms allow filers to report wide ranges instead of the specific value of their investments.)
Burgum made his fortune 25 years ago when he sold a software company to Microsoft and has remained heavily invested in technology. In the year before joining the administration, when he was North Dakota’s governor, he made between $2.1 million and $11 million in capital gains from AI-related investments, Save Our Parks’ analysis showed. 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 but not give up his financial interests there.
“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement. “Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”
Officials across the Trump administration also stand to profit from the White House’s support for AI and data centers. For example, 380 of President Donald Trump’s political appointees or their spouses hold stocks or have other financial connections to Nvidia, which has become the world’s most valuable company thanks to the data center boom. More than 320 have ties to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which plans to spend at least $195 billion this year building data centers and AI-related technology. And more than 240 are invested in or otherwise have financial ties to Meta Platforms, which is developing a “fleet” of data centers. This is according to an analysis of records added last week to the Trump Team Financials database developed by ProPublica to make accessible the financial disclosures of administration officials.
Federal officials’ activities are governed by a criminal statute that sets a high burden of proof for potential wrongdoing — for example, approving permits for a company in which they are substantially invested, multiple ethics professors and lawyers told ProPublica. They said that Burgum’s investments appear to be acceptable under this law.
But ethics rules that do not carry criminal penalties also apply, explained Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group. These rules, she said, “instruct officials not to work on anything that would create the appearance of a conflict of interest.” She said this would include Burgum’s support for data centers on federal land while holding investments in AI.
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. “In the Bush administration, the answer would’ve been ‘he has to recuse,’ I can guarantee you that.”
A review of recent Interior Department secretaries’ financial holdings suggests it’s common to have some potential conflicts, but Trump’s appointees are more heavily invested in the industries they oversee than their predecessors. Deb Haaland, President Joe Biden’s appointee, held no direct financial investments in companies the department regulated. President Barack Obama’s first appointee, Ken Salazar, listed ownership of his family’s ranch but few other investments. Obama’s second appointee, Sally Jewell, held stocks in oil and gas, which she agreed to divest as a condition of her confirmation.
Ryan Zinke and David Bernhardt served as Interior Department secretaries during Trump’s first term. The former was found by the agency’s Office of Inspector General to have improperly assisted a development in his hometown, while the latter had so many potential conflicts that he reportedly carried a card listing them. (Zinke said the OIG investigation was a political attack, while Bernhardt recused himself from several decisions in which there would have been clear conflicts.)
More recently, as the effort to build data centers has run headlong into broad public opposition, the current administration has offered federally managed public lands to them. Unlike local or state processes, where concerns about water use, power consumption and the lack of transparency around permitting have slowed or halted projects, the public has less ability to stop them on federal property. The Interior Department oversees most of this land.
A little-noticed U.S. Geological Survey report released earlier this year found at least 91.3 million acres of public lands managed by the Interior Department — an area comparable to Montana — could potentially host data centers.
The department’s mandate includes overseeing tribal affairs, managing national parks, regulating extractive industries like coal and operating dams across the West. Burgum, though, is spending significant time on other things. This includes meeting with representatives of companies such as 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 response, several Democratic senators sent a letter to Burgum in October saying, “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.”
Some of Burgum’s meetings have been previously unreported, including a June 2025 dinner with a high-ranking United Arab Emirates delegation in the wine room of the upscale Italian restaurant Cafe Milano in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. The small guest list included the United Arab Emirates’ AI lead, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, as well as Amos Hochstein, a prominent American proponent of AI data centers via his investment firm TWG Global.
Several months later, Burgum signed a memorandum of understanding with the Emirati delegation, pledging to work together to deploy AI.
Neither the Emirati Embassy nor TWG Global responded to requests for comment.
The Interior Department spokesperson said that Burgum “is responsible for helping unleash American energy production and ensuring our nation has the resources and infrastructure necessary to lead the future. That mission requires engagement with industry leaders, stakeholders, and international partners.”
In an August Fox News appearance to promote the administration’s AI efforts, Burgum was asked about the network’s poll showing 70% of voters opposed data centers. He countered by alleging that “foreign influence” and “misinformation” had played a large role in fueling public opposition.
Jayson O’Neill, a spokesperson for Save Our Parks, said Burgum and others in the administration are out of touch with public concerns. “His almost myopic focus on artificial intelligence and the data center build-out at the expense of our public lands serves not only the globalist tech titans behind and within the Trump administration, but also him and the tens of millions of dollars of his own personal wealth invested in the industry.”
Potential Conflicts of Interest Across the Administration
Across the administration, political appointees whose offices have AI business before them hold significant investments in the industry.
Steve Pearce is director of the Bureau of Land Management, the Interior Department agency that administers more land than any other entity in the country. The former New Mexico representative was confirmed over Democrats’ concerns that he favors selling public lands and that his career in oil and gas presents a conflict of interest involving an industry the agency regulates.
But public lands advocates say his AI investments now worry them. Pearce 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. He 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.)
An agency spokesperson pushed back on the concerns. “Director Pearce complies with all applicable federal ethics requirements and financial disclosure obligations,” the spokesperson said in a statement, adding that “conflating lawful disclosure of financial holdings with an actual conflict of interest ignores the federal ethics framework designed to identify and address precisely these questions.”
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. This is according to an agency spokesperson and its Mineral & Land Records System.
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. (An Interior Department appeals board has since paused the project, sending it back to the agency for further review.)
Meanwhile, it remains unclear how much the public will benefit from data centers on BLM land. The foundational federal land management law was passed in 1976, so it does not envision data centers. Even so, the department said it is relying on this statute to permit data centers.
Businesses pay the government to use public land. Oil and gas drillers pay a royalty on each barrel they produce. Solar power plants pay a per-megawatt fee.
For data centers, the main charge appears set to be an “annual fair-market-value rent,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. But such rental fees can be quite low, so the economic benefit to the public won’t be known until the data centers are permitted.
Another key official with a land management agency who’s heavily invested in AI is Michael Boren. He 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, second only to the BLM in the land area it stewards.
Among his many investments in AI companies, Boren reported between about $1.5 million and $6.1 million worth of financial interests in Elon Musk’s xAI, which has since been acquired by SpaceX. Additionally, he 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.
“Undersecretary Boren has fully complied with all federal ethics laws and requirements and will continue to follow the advice of USDA’s excellent ethics attorneys,” an Agriculture Department spokesperson said in a statement.
Lee Zeldin, whom Trump appointed to head the Environmental Protection Agency, has also emerged as a major AI booster. He too has dabbled in AI investments. Zeldin’s financial disclosure forms reveal that in May 2025 he bought and sold up to $15,000 worth of shares of Datavault AI, a company selling AI-, data- and blockchain-based products.
“Administrator Zeldin followed every ethical rule to a tee in his disclosure without exception,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement. The agency added that he was cleared by its ethics officials and that he has no obligation to explain such transactions.
The EPA under Zeldin has taken steps to minimize oversight of data centers and power plants built nearby to keep them running. This includes a rule the agency proposed in July to end a requirement that states gather public feedback as they consider air permits for certain facilities, including data centers.
In October, a group of Democratic senators sent a letter to Zeldin asking the EPA 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.
This story originally appeared on ProPublica
