380 Trump appointees or spouses have financial ties to Nvidia, analysis finds
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum holds between $18.1 million and $64.4 million in investments in artificial intelligence companies, according to an analysis of the companies’ marketing materials that the public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks shared with ProPublica. The figures draw on Burgum’s 2026 financial disclosure form, which had not been previously reported; government disclosure forms allow filers to report wide ranges instead of the specific value of their investments. The holdings tie Burgum’s personal finances to an industry that the department he leads is helping to expand onto federally managed public land.
Burgum is the White House’s point person on an infrastructure push the administration has likened to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb. He has described an “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.
Much of Burgum’s wealth is held in Arthur Ventures, an investment firm he co-founded, according to the disclosure form. In the ethics agreement he signed as part of his confirmation, Burgum agreed to resign from his positions at Arthur but to keep his financial interests there. He made his fortune 25 years ago when he sold a software company to Microsoft. In the year before joining the administration, while 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.
“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior spokesperson said in a statement. “Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”
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 the official is substantially invested — and multiple ethics professors and lawyers told ProPublica that Burgum’s investments appear to be acceptable under the law. Rules that do not carry criminal penalties also apply, said Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel at the government watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. Those rules, she said, “instruct officials not to work on anything that would create the appearance of a conflict of interest,” a standard she said covers Burgum’s support for data centers on federal land while holding investments in AI.
Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota who served as President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, said Burgum should avoid making decisions that benefit 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.”
Burgum is not alone. Records added last week to the Trump Team Financials database, which ProPublica developed to make administration officials’ financial disclosures accessible, show that 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.
A review of recent Interior Department secretaries’ financial holdings suggests it is common for the job to involve some potential conflicts, but that 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. Ken Salazar, President Barack Obama’s first appointee, listed ownership of his family’s ranch but few other investments, and Obama’s second appointee, Sally Jewell, held stocks in oil and gas that she agreed to divest as a condition of her confirmation. During Trump’s first term, Ryan Zinke was found by the department’s Office of Inspector General to have improperly assisted a development in his hometown — an investigation Zinke called a political attack — while David Bernhardt had so many potential conflicts that he reportedly carried a card listing them, and recused himself from several decisions in which there would have been clear conflicts.
The administration has offered federally managed public lands to data centers as projects face broad public opposition. Unlike local and 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 data centers on federal property, most of which the Interior Department oversees. A little-noticed U.S. Geological Survey report released earlier this year found at least 91.3 million acres of Interior-managed public land — an area comparable to Montana — could potentially host data centers.
Burgum’s own schedule reflects the outreach: he met 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 the public interest watchdog group Public Citizen. Several Democratic senators demanded in an October letter that Burgum “immediately cease all efforts to hijack public lands for the development of data centers” and provide full transparency on his role in the department’s siting efforts. Some meetings were previously unreported, including a June 2025 dinner with a high-ranking United Arab Emirates delegation in the wine room of Cafe Milano, an upscale Italian restaurant in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. The small guest list included the UAE’s AI lead, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, and Amos Hochstein, a prominent American proponent of AI data centers through 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 Burgum “is responsible for helping unleash American energy production and ensuring our nation has the resources and infrastructure necessary to lead the future,” and that the mission “requires engagement with industry leaders, stakeholders, and international partners.” In an August appearance on Fox News 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,” O’Neill said.
The pattern extends to the agencies that manage the land. Steve Pearce, director of the Bureau of Land Management — the Interior Department agency that administers more land than any other entity in the country — 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. Pearce, a former New Mexico representative who 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, 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. “Director Pearce complies with all applicable federal ethics requirements and financial disclosure obligations,” an agency 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, according to an agency spokesperson and the agency’s Mineral & Land Records System. The project set to become 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 agency approved the change in June without studying the potential environmental implications, and an Interior Department appeals board has since paused the project and sent it back for further review. How much the public will benefit from the data centers also remains an open question: the foundational federal land management law was passed in 1976 and does not envision them, though the department said it is relying on the statute to permit them. Businesses pay the government to use public land — oil and gas drillers pay a royalty on each barrel they produce, and solar power plants pay a per-megawatt fee — but for data centers, the main charge appears set to be an “annual fair-market-value rent,” an Interior Department spokesperson said. Such rental fees can be quite low, so the economic benefit to the public will not be known until the data centers are permitted.
Michael Boren, who served first as acting assistant secretary at the Interior Department and now oversees the U.S. Forest Service as an undersecretary at the Department of Agriculture, reported between about $1.5 million and $6.1 million in financial interests in Elon Musk’s xAI, which has since been acquired by SpaceX. Boren also 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. The Forest Service stewards land second in area only to the BLM’s. “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.
At the Environmental Protection Agency, Administrator Lee Zeldin — who has emerged as a major AI booster — bought and sold up to $15,000 worth of shares of Datavault AI, a company selling AI-, data- and blockchain-based products, in May 2025, according to his financial disclosure forms. “Administrator Zeldin followed every ethical rule to a tee in his disclosure without exception,” an EPA spokesperson said in a statement, adding that agency ethics officials cleared him and that he has no obligation to explain such transactions. The EPA under Zeldin has taken steps to minimize oversight of data centers and the power plants built nearby to keep them running, including a rule 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 asked the agency to withdraw the proposal, writing that “the federal government should encourage transparency and public engagement around these projects, not make it easier to shroud their construction in secrecy.”