As opposition to AI data centers mounts across the country, the Trump administration is moving full speed ahead to approve and construct them on America’s public lands. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum is a vocal proponent of building data centers on public lands, while dismissing concerns around the associated impacts on water supplies and energy costs. In a May speech to North Dakota oil and gas industry executives, Burgum claimed that data centers will lower the cost of electricity for consumers and that the facilities could be the “greatest thing” for coal and natural gas companies in the state.
Burgum and the Trump administration are barreling ahead with this plan without giving the public a chance to weigh in on whether data centers are even an appropriate ‘use’ of public lands. Until recently, the extent of the administration’s plans for locating data centers on public lands was not widely known, and they still remain somewhat shrouded in secrecy. But recent news reports and a congressional letter, informed by research from the Center for Western Priorities, point to at least a dozen proposals on roughly 17,600 acres of BLM land in six states. And the actual count could be much higher.
Over the summer, the U.S. Geological Survey quietly released a report analyzing the potential for building AI data centers on federally-managed public lands. The report appears to lay the groundwork for promoting the construction of data centers on public lands before answering a key question: Are data centers an appropriate and legal use of national public lands under the Federal Land Policy and Management Act?
The first of these projects is already tied up in legal controversy, after the administration attempted an end run around the laws governing development on public lands in order to approve it. On June 26, the Bureau of Land Management permitted a 167-megawatt facility on public land near Boulder City, Nevada without doing even a cursory review of the facility’s environmental impacts. In early September, the Interior Board of Land Appeals stayed the project in response to a challenge from Boulder City and environmental groups. Construction remains on hold while the appeal proceeds.
Lawmakers are pressing for answers, too. On September 24, Representatives Jared Huffman and Dina Titus and 13 other lawmakers sent a letter to Interior Secretary Doug Burgum with 18 questions about data centers on public lands, including how the public will weigh in and whether projects will get full environmental reviews. The lawmakers requested answers to their questions by October 8, which have not been received as of mid-October.
Are data centers even an appropriate use of public lands?
Data centers are not like oil, gas, or minerals, which are extracted from public lands because that’s where they exist. Wind and solar energy can be produced on public lands, too, but those projects operate under frameworks developed by agencies and Congress that allow for environmental review and public input. No similar framework exists for data centers, and the country needs one before rushing headlong into approving data centers without a clear understanding of the legality and associated environmental impacts. Unlike mining or drilling, there are no natural resources that make it necessary to develop data centers on public lands, and there is no reason to assume data centers belong on them.
Siting projects on public lands without an approval framework carries legal risk, as the Boulder City example in Nevada shows. There is also a basic fairness problem: a private company could profit from a publicly-owned resource (public land) with no established way of returning revenue to taxpayers, the way royalties and permit fees do for oil and gas or renewable energy projects on public lands. Meanwhile, as the House lawmakers’ letter notes, the BLM has lost nearly half its staff, which raises questions about the agency’s capacity to properly review a wave of new projects and right-of-way applications.
Mapping data center proposals on BLM land
Recent reporting, mentioned above, indicates that the administration is compiling lists of public lands for data center-related infrastructure and development across 17,600 acres of BLM land in Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, and Wyoming. The fact that any type of development of this scale is being considered without transparency and the opportunity for public comment and environmental review is alarming. In a recent interview on CNBC, Secretary Burgum pushed strongly for data centers, criticizing landmark environmental laws, including the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the Historic Preservation Act for slowing them down, claiming the three laws were “the trifecta of how to legally attempt to stop things from being built in America.”
According to a recent analysis by the Center for Western Priorities, the scale that data centers are being considered on public lands could be much higher and further along the approval pipeline than previously known. CWP reviewed land use authorizations and right-of-way applications in BLM’s Mineral & Lands Record System database to assess the Trump administration’s efforts to permit data centers on public land. We pulled right-of-way case data from MLRS, then reviewed case names and applicants to flag cases tied to data centers, hyperscale facilities, or small modular nuclear reactors, an experimental technology some developers are planning to use to power their data centers. Our BLM Data Center Tracker shows that, as of early October, there are at least 35 active data center-related cases covering more than 24,000 acres in six Western states. Because many of the pending projects don’t include acreage data, the actual number of acres in play may be significantly larger.
Click on individual cases in the map to see details regarding applicant, acreage, case type (including infrastructure, such as water pipelines and power and transmission lines). Each case is drawn from BLM’s own land description records, so the boundaries come straight from the agency’s survey data. Applicants don’t always use obvious keywords in their applications and names, so the map represents a baseline and may undercount the total number of pending projects. CWP will continue to update the map as new cases appear.
Calls for a public lands data center moratorium are growing
On October 5, The Wilderness Society became one of the first national conservation organizations to call for a moratorium on approving and constructing AI data centers on national public lands. In a press release, the group said an immediate pause is necessary as the Trump administration is considering a rapid buildout of data centers across BLM lands without sufficient information about the threats to water supplies, energy demand, wildlife habitat, and public access.
“Before we rush headlong into sacrificing these lands for an industrial AI boom, our elected leaders need to hit the pause button and ask the public—the owners of these lands—if this is what we want for our shared public lands,” TWS president Tracy Stone-Manning said in a statement. If the administration doesn’t act, TWS wants Congress to pass a moratorium during the upcoming lame-duck session.
Other organizations are joining the call for a moratorium. Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility sent a letter to the leaders of the House and Senate Appropriations Committees urging Congress to block data centers on public lands. “It’s hard to imagine a move more out of step with the public than building data centers on public lands,” said PEER Executive Director Tim Whitehouse. “Americans love their public lands and have legitimate concerns about data centers.”
The public isn’t buying it
By moving ahead to approve data centers on public lands without an analysis and environmental review framework, the administration is rushing headlong into strong public opposition. Recent polling in Wyoming shows just how unpopular data centers are as a use of public lands. In a July survey of 450 likely voters conducted by Cygnal for Keep It Public Wyoming, over 90 percent of respondents said data centers are not an acceptable use of public lands.
National polling points the same way. While not specific to public lands, a Fox News poll in July found 70 percent of registered voters oppose building data centers in their area. Recent polling from Pew Research Center shows a sharp decline in Americans’ views of data centers since January. More than half of Americans (54 percent) now say data centers are mostly bad for the environment, up from 39 percent in January, and half (50 percent) say they are mostly bad for home energy costs, up from 38 percent. The shift crosses party and demographic lines: the share of Republicans who say data centers are mostly bad for the environment rose from 31 to 47 percent, and among rural adults moved from 32 to 50 percent.
The lack of regulatory certainty, coupled with a pattern of secrecy among data center developers is also costing companies money. The country’s largest technology companies are expected to spend more than $800 billion this year on data centers and AI, but according to new Heatmap Pro data, at least $260 billion in data center investment has been canceled this year after sustained local opposition. About half of that was canceled in the third quarter alone, more than in all of 2025, and roughly half of the projects that faced local backlash this year were ultimately canceled.
The bottom line
Public lands belong to all Americans, which is why decisions about them are supposed to involve the public. Federal law requires the federal government to complete project-specific environmental analyses and reviews for large infrastructure projects on public lands, but the Trump administration has moved quickly to avoid performing those analyses or asking for public comment. What we see now is the result: widespread public backlash because the Trump administration and data center developers are working in tandem to sidestep communities’ concerns and opposition.
“If there are places where communities think it is appropriate to build data centers, focus on those,” CWP executive director Aaron Weiss said in an interview with the New Republic. “The Trump administration needs to stop cutting the public out of public land management. The solution is more public notice and more opportunities for stakeholders to shape projects on the front end.”
So far, the Trump administration is taking the opposite approach when it comes to data centers. The administration tried to skip public comment and environmental analysis when it approved the Boulder City proposal, which was paused only after local leaders and conservation groups pushed back.
Our data center map shows dozens more cases quietly moving through BLM’s approval pipeline while the administration has yet to analyze or determine whether data centers are even a legal use of public lands. Regardless, a majority of Americans have already answered the question of whether data centers are an appropriate use of public lands: Poll after poll shows majorities across party lines don’t want data centers in their communities, and billions of dollars in projects have collapsed under local opposition. Now, conservation groups are asking for a pause before the destruction caused by data centers on public lands can’t be undone.