Interior Secretary Burgum Holds Up to $64M in AI Investments While Siting Data Centers on Public Land

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum holds between $18.1 million and $64.4 million in AI company investments while leading the federal push to build data centers on public lands, according to an analysis of his 2026 financial disclosure form conducted by the advocacy group Save Our Parks and shared with ProPublica. Government disclosure forms permit filers to report wide ranges rather than precise values.

Much of Burgum's wealth sits in Arthur Ventures, the investment firm he co-founded. He sold a software company to Microsoft 25 years ago and has stayed heavily invested in technology. In the year before joining the administration, while serving as North Dakota's governor, he realized between $2.1 million and $11 million in capital gains from AI-related investments. In 2025 he sold additional AI stocks and equity, generating capital gains of between $2.5 million and $15.1 million.

The White House has compared the AI infrastructure build-out to the Manhattan Project. Burgum, the administration's point person, has framed the competition with China as existential. "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 at his January 2025 Senate confirmation hearing.

What did Burgum's ethics agreement require?

His confirmation ethics agreement required him to resign positions at Arthur Ventures but allowed him to keep his financial interests in the firm. A Department of the Interior spokesperson said Burgum "has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations" and called any suggestion that his decisions are driven by personal investments "false and completely unsupported."

Ethics lawyers said the arrangement appears lawful. A criminal statute governs federal officials but sets a high bar for wrongdoing — such as approving permits for a substantially held company — multiple ethics professors and lawyers told ProPublica. Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said non-criminal rules still "instruct officials not to work on anything that would create the appearance of a conflict of interest," including Burgum's data center advocacy. Richard Painter, chief ethics lawyer under President George W. Bush, was blunt: "I, as the ethics lawyer, would insist he stay away from it. In the Bush administration, the answer would've been 'he has to recuse.'"

How widespread are administration AI holdings?

• 380 Trump political appointees or their spouses hold stocks or other financial connections to Nvidia, now the world's most valuable company.
• More than 320 have ties to Alphabet, which plans to spend at least $195 billion this year on data centers and AI technology.
• More than 240 have financial ties to Meta Platforms, which is developing a data center "fleet."

The figures come from ProPublica's Trump Team Financials database, updated last week.

Steve Pearce, director of the Bureau of Land Management, disclosed stock in Nvidia, Meta, Microsoft, Apple and Alphabet, plus an investment in Titan Development, a real estate firm that has managed Southwest land acquisitions for data centers. He pledged to divest many AI holdings but not Titan. An agency spokesperson said Pearce "complies with all applicable federal ethics requirements" and accused critics of "conflating lawful disclosure of financial holdings with an actual conflict of interest."

How much public land is in play?

A U.S. Geological Survey report released earlier this year found at least 91.3 million acres of Interior-managed public lands — an area comparable to Montana — could potentially host data centers. The BLM is reviewing permit applications for about 15 data centers and 17 associated infrastructure projects, including nuclear power plants and transmission lines, in Arizona, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Wyoming and Idaho.

The first proposed BLM data center, near Boulder City, Nevada, won a solar plant permit, then changed plans; the BLM approved the change in June without studying environmental implications. An Interior Department appeals board has since paused the project and returned it for further review.

Federal land law dates to 1976 and does not envision data centers, yet the department relies on it for permitting. Data centers would pay an "annual fair-market-value rent," an Interior spokesperson said; public economic benefit remains unknown until permits issue.

Who else is invested?

Michael Boren, USDA undersecretary overseeing the Forest Service, reported between $1.5 million and $6.1 million in xAI, the Elon Musk company acquired by SpaceX, plus up to $500,000 in Valar Atomics, which seeks to build Project Beehive — a data center complex on thousands of Utah BLM acres with more than 450 small nuclear plants. A USDA spokesperson said Boren "has fully complied with all federal ethics laws." EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin disclosed buying and selling up to $15,000 of Datavault AI shares in May 2025; his EPA proposed a July rule ending required state public feedback on air permits for facilities including data centers.

Burgum met Amazon, Microsoft and Alphabet representatives more than 20 times from January through November 2025, per schedules compiled by Public Citizen. Democratic senators wrote him in October demanding he "immediately cease all efforts to hijack public lands" for data centers. A June 2025 Georgetown dinner with UAE AI lead Sultan Ahmed Al Jabar and investor Amos Hochstein preceded a signed memorandum of understanding to deploy AI jointly with the Emirates.