President Donald Trump’s administration is making an aggressive push to find public lands to use for building artificial intelligence data centers, according to a Friday report in The Washington Sun.
The US Department of the Interior, under the leadership of Secretary Doug Burgum, has pushed the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to “identify public land ripe for data center development,” and provide lists to department leadership, reported the Sun.
Leaders at the Interior Department gave state BLM leaders just three days to compile their lists, emphasizing this was a “top priority,” the Sun’s sources said.
Additionally, reported the Sun, Burgum has been meeting regularly with Big Tech executives to discuss ways to accelerate data center development.
The department’s aggressive push stems from a Trump executive order signed in July 2025 that tasked the government with identifying federal lands that could be used to build data centers.
Mary Jo Rugwell, president of the Public Lands Foundation and former BLM state director, told the Sun that she’s concerned that the Trump administration is “bending knee to the tech oligarchs and letting them do whatever they need to do” without asking the right questions about data centers’ impact on public lands.
Rugwell added that the BLM during Trump’s second term has shed nearly half of its staff, leaving few experts available to evaluate the environmental impact of data centers.
“Where are they going to get people to do the analysis especially when you have a technology that’s relatively new and not well defined?” Rugwell asked. “It’s a headache BLM doesn’t need."
Olivia Tanager, director of the Sierra Club’s Nevada chapter, told the Sun that the nationwide backlash to data center construction has gotten so intense that the tech industry might see using public lands as their best option for building out capacity.
“A lot of elected officials in Nevada on both sides of the aisle are really hesitant to approve data centers in their local jurisdiction,” said Tanager. “I would imagine in some cases, despite the environmental review being heightened in a lot of instances being sited on federal public land, there’s more political will to move those projects forward.”
Jayson O’Neill, spokesperson for Save Our Parks, accused Burgum of trying to “exploit our parks and public lands” for the benefit of wealthy tech donors.
“Data Center Doug Burgum is actively shopping America’s public lands to data center developers, the AI industry, and big energy companies lining up to power them,” O’Neill said. “And he’s keeping communities in the dark, hiding the details from Congress and the public.”
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