The Trump administration is quietly working to hand over vast stretches of America’s public lands to billionaires and technology companies — and the scale is bigger than known, according to a Friday investigation by The Washington Sun.
According to locals who would be affected, they have been kept completely in the dark.
The Bureau of Land Management is reviewing at least “12 data center and infrastructure proposals covering more than 17,600 acres” across six Western states — Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming — the outlet reported, citing public right-of-way records. Many of the proposals have never been publicly disclosed and aren’t easily found on BLM’s own website.
In Utah, nuclear startup Valar Atomics is reportedly pushing two data centers powered by small nuclear reactors, including a sprawling 10,200-acre site near Green River. Arizona has four proposed projects that could gobble up more than 3,000 acres of public land.
The catch: local officials in several states told the Sun they had no idea the deals were even on the table, raising transparency concerns among conservation advocates.
According to Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of HEAL Utah, an environmental advocacy group, no one saw this coming.
“It’s really, really hard to find information about this stuff, and I think it’s representative of the way the industry in general is operating with a lack of transparency that I think is really deeply concerning,” she told the Sun. “Both the AI industry and the nuclear industry, which seem to be in this unholy alliance right now.”
“If there are places where communities think it is appropriate to build data centers, focus on those,” Aaron Weiss, director of the Center for Western Priorities, told the Sun. “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.”
It’s the latest flashpoint in Trump’s AI infrastructure push, which has already sparked fury after the administration moved to gut public comment periods on data center pollution permits. Polling shows 70% of Americans oppose data centers landing in their backyards, yet the buildout barrels forward, often in the dark.
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