Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has spent the past 18 months arguing for data centers. Now he’s putting them on public lands
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has touted his support for data centers since the day he took office. At a Breitbart policy event in March 2025, he said, “We take electricity and an AI data center. We manufacture intelligence.” Two months later, at an America First Policy Institute event, he raised the stakes considerably, warning that: “Whoever controls the manufacture of intelligence is going to control the world.” By that May, his talking point had condensed into a slogan: “We’re going to ‘mine, baby, mine’ so we can ‘build, baby, build’ because we got to build AI data centers.”
When Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced legislation to pause new data center construction, Burgum said a moratorium would amount to waving “”the surrender flag to China.” When residents near proposed sites raised concerns about water consumption, he called it a “red herring.” And when communities organized to fight data centers, he suggested the opposition is “not organic and local,” telling Breitbart it’s powered by “foreign source dark money.”
Burgum’s entire playbook is to treat local communities as an obstacle to override rather than a constituency to answer to. Every step of the way, he cuts the public out of public lands—from drilling to data centers—in order to enact his boss’s agenda.
In July 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing the Interior and Energy departments to identify federal land and “offer appropriate authorizations” for data center projects, with a fast track for anything using 100 megawatts of power. The Energy department moved first, identifying 16 federal sites for potential development, including a proposed $100 billion, 1.8-gigawatt campus in Paducah, Kentucky.
On June 26, 2026, the Bureau of Land Management approved the first AI data center sited directly on public land: 88.5 acres in Nevada’s Eldorado Valley, outside Boulder City, cleared for a 167-megawatt facility, consuming enough electricity to power roughly 75,000 homes. The land had originally been approved for a 19-megawatt solar farm. That’s about nine times more energy consumption than the solar farm would have produced. Rather than conduct a new environmental review for a project with a wildly different energy footprint, BLM simply declared the data center “substantially the same” and reused the old permitting paperwork, skipping a public comment period entirely. The site is in endangered desert tortoise habitat, in the middle of a region already plagued by drought.
Lake Mead and Boulder City, Nevada; Source: Doc Searls/Wikimedia
Boulder City’s government says it found out about the switch-up from the developer, not from the Interior department. The city council has voted to appeal. The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club have sued, arguing the agency gutted the environmental review and cut the public out of a decision about their own backyard. Olivia Tanager with the Sierra Club said the administration is trying “to hand over Nevada’s desert to billion-dollar tech companies.” In a statement, Interior said the project is an example of “the growing role of public lands in supporting the infrastructure needed to power innovation, advanced technology, and the nation’s future economic growth.”
Nevada isn’t the only place data center developers are finding a friend in Doug Burgum. In Virginia, a company called Highland Digital has proposed a land swap that would allow it to build a data center in Prince William Forest Park, one of the largest protected green spaces in the D.C. metro area and a National Park Service unit that is under Burgum’s purview. Under the plan, Highland Digital would trade 73 acres of wetlands it owns for 36 acres of federal parkland along the park’s western border, clearing the way for at least four data centers and an electric substation. An investigation by Heatmap News found that a former Trump Interior department adviser lobbied NPS and Interior on the developer’s behalf for nearly a year, and that the agency’s own GIS map of the park was updated to match parcel lines supplied by the developer, without any chance for the public or Congress to weigh in.
Finally, Burgum has made renewable energy nearly impossible to build on public land, pushing developers to try to build data centers instead. In April, Clearway Energy Group asked the Interior department to swap out an application to build a 500-megawatt solar project in the Nevada desert to a data center and natural gas facility, according to Heatmap News. Clearway withdrew its data center application in July, likely due to public outcry over the Boulder City, Nevada project, which essentially asked for the same thing from Interior and received approval in June.
This approach is the exact opposite of what Western voters say they want, according to numerous polls released over the past year. Colorado College’s 2026 Conservation in the West poll found that 80 percent of Western voters see data centers as a threat to water quality and supply, while Gallup found in March that 71 percent of Americans oppose a data center being built in their area. A Fox News poll in July found that nearly 8 in 10 voters would rather see data center construction slow down than speed up. And a recent poll commissioned by Keep It Public Wyoming found that just 8.5 percent of Republican primary voters consider building data centers an acceptable use of the state’s public lands.
Voter sentiment polling in Wyoming; Source: Keep it Public Wyoming
Despite overwhelming public opposition, Doug Burgum is putting his public statements about data centers into action. He is pushing them on public lands by claiming that the benefits are self-evident, that the timeline is too urgent for a normal permitting process, and that any community that objects is on the wrong side of history, China, or both. In Pennsylvania earlier this month, he essentially confirmed this, saying “the benefits [of data centers] outweigh the challenges,” and adding that it’s Interior’s job to “find communities that support that.”
Boulder City didn’t get a say. With Burgum leading the charge and an executive order clearing the way, it’s unlikely the next town will either.
Feature image: A Google data center in The Dalles, Oregon, Source: Tony Webster/Wikimedia
