President Donald Trump’s directive to accelerate data center development on federal lands is facing public backlash and legal hurdles. Behind the scenes, the Trump administration is pushing full steam ahead and sparking concerns it is prioritizing corporate needs over the public good.
The Bureau of Land Management has asked its state directors to identify public land ripe for data center development, according to two people familiar with the request, and those leaders have compiled lists for Interior Department leadership.
Interior leadership gave state leaders just three days to produce the lists and told its directors the issue was a top priority, according to a former BLM official involved in the discussions. The request has encountered several challenges: Bureau lands are typically remote and not near basics like electricity and water, agency staff lack the technical expertise to conduct requisite reviews, and overwhelming vacancies after dramatic staffing losses under Trump have diminished capacity.
The directive follows an executive order Trump issued last year to accelerate permitting for data centers, including by identifying federal lands that could accommodate them. As the Trump administration is proposing further cuts to BLM, it has stressed in its most recent budget blueprint that the bureau should refocus its efforts on aiding the building out of data centers for AI.
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The push also comes after Interior Secretary Doug Burgum held meetings with dozens of technology and energy executives last year, according to a Washington Sun review of his calendar.
Those meetings included a conversation with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy last spring about permitting, infrastructure and technology “to support data center growth.”
The aggressive push inside the agency, and Burgum’s frequent meetings with industry, has stakeholders fearful that the administration is putting the interests of AI companies first at a time where widespread backlash has made companies desperate for more land to build out their infrastructure.
“I’m not against development or progress but I think there are too many questions about this and nobody is asking them,” said Mary Jo Rugwell, a former BLM state director who now serves as president of the Public Lands Foundation. “I think we’re just bending knee to the tech oligarchs and letting them do whatever they need to do.”
BLM has shed nearly half of its staff under Trump using a hiring freeze and various separation incentives. Rugwell, who left the agency in 2019, noted those remaining are already focused on other administration priorities, including oil and gas development, grazing and mining.
“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 said. “It’s a headache BLM doesn’t need.”
The first former BLM official said their state had 50% vacancy rates in its land and realty divisions — the offices that would have to oversee data center development — and the employees still in place will have to get trained up on how to conduct a National Environmental Policy Act for a new technology. The new prioritization will add to a backlog of permits awaiting approval from the bureau, they said.
“In the midst of the loss of hundreds of employees from BLM over the last couple years, it’s another demand on land and realty staff that are already hugely taxed,” the former official said.
The administration has not completed any environmental reviews for data centers on public lands. The first approved data center on BLM land, near Boulder City, Nevada, was halted by a judge after developers tried to use an earlier environmental study for a proposed solar array at the same site.
A couple of projects on public lands are in earlier stages.
BLM approved a data center developer’s request to do geological and groundwater testing on public lands near Silver Springs, Nevada, but those projects haven’t gone through full reviews. In Virginia, the National Park Service is considering a land swap that would give a data center developer 36 acres of federally owned park land in Prince William Forest Park.
Burgum and Housing and Urban Development Secretary Scott Turner last year created a task force to identify federal lands to develop for housing, though it has yet to share any updates from those efforts. The former BLM official said the search for data center centers has met a similar fate as the one for housing, as bureau lands have proven poorly equipped for either.
But despite less-than-ideal locations, federal public lands may be some of the few places where developers could avoid having to answer for angry local residents, as public opposition to data centers continues to mount.
“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 Olivia Tanager, director of the Sierra Club’s Nevada chapter. “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.”
The Interior Department and BLM did not respond to requests for comment.
Burgum has frequently used his platform to tout the advantages of AI buildout and refers to data centers as “intelligence factories.”
“If we’re talking about building a facility that’s specifically related to AI, it’s the first time in human history we can take a kilowatt of electricity and instead of turning it into light or heat, we can turn it into intelligence,” the secretary told “The TechEd Podcast” earlier this year. “And that’s just a complete game changer.”
Calendar records from 2025 show Burgum met with a wide range of executives whose companies are involved with AI data center development.
Burgum discussed permitting reform in a July 2025 meeting with Brendan Bechtel, whose company designs and builds AI data centers and works with Nvidia. The two first met at an AI summit.
Then-CEO of NextEra Armando Pimentel and Vice President Mike Sole were seated at Burgum’s table during a reception at an event in support of the Everglades. NextEra is part of a $100 billion project to develop a data center at a U.S. Department of Energy site in Kentucky.
In February 2025, Burgum spent an hour with Wael Sawan, the CEO of Shell. Across three days in March, he met with the CEOs of Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, which have each invested in technology for data centers or have agreements to help power those facilities.
Also in March, Burgum had dinner with Baker Hughes CEO Lorenzo Simonelli. Baker Hughes announced a collaboration with Google on technology for data centers early this year. The CEOs of Coterra Energy (now Devon Energy), Williams Companies and Sempra Infrastructure — all companies that have made significant moves to be part of the AI boom — were also at that dinner.
About a week later, Burgum met with SpaceX executives, including President Gwynne Shotwell, who has pitched building data centers in space as soon as next year. In 2026, SpaceX acquired xAI, which has built some of the biggest data centers in the U.S. on the border between Tennessee and Mississippi.
Burgum’s calendars for 2026 are not yet publicly available.
The bureau is required to manage public lands to “best meet the present and future needs of the American people,” balancing productivity and environmental quality, and not necessarily prioritizing economic return.
While the Trump administration has made the argument that building out AI infrastructure in the U.S. is for the public good, whether data centers fall within the BLM’s mandate to balance multiple uses on public lands is still up for debate.
“Using federal public land for the benefit of some of the richest companies in the history of the world, instead of holding those lands in public trust for public enjoyment,” Tanager said, “is one of the worst uses of public land I can think of.”
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