Kyle Lutnick, the 29-year-old scion of his family’s real estate business, traveled in July to Amarillo, Texas, to walk a dusty tract of land with the head of an artificial intelligence start-up called Fermi America.
He was touring the site of a future data center with Toby Neugebauer, a billionaire who is building one of the behemoth facilities that will power the next generation of A.I. Mr. Lutnick’s company was helping raise capital for the center, banking millions in fees in the process.
“Polite young man,” Mr. Neugebauer said in an interview.
A month later, Kyle’s father, Howard Lutnick, was photographed with Mr. Neugebauer at an event near the White House that celebrated Fermi’s partnership with a South Korean company on the same data center project.
This sequence of events — a son making money on a project his father is boosting as a federal official — has come up repeatedly since President Trump tapped Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce Department, according to an investigation by The New York Times.
In that role, Mr. Lutnick has twisted the arms of American allies, dangling policy favors in exchange for investments in U.S. industrial projects. At times, these tactics have created opportunities for his family’s clients to gain access to much-needed foreign capital, The Times found.
Mr. Lutnick, for example, demanded that the South Korean government invest billions of dollars in U.S. industry to reduce tariffs. Mr. Neugebauer is vying for a share of those investment dollars to build the data center that Mr. Lutnick’s family is also helping to finance.
The job of commerce secretary has always been to promote American industry through deal-making at home and abroad, and the position has traditionally been populated with titans of industry who were expected to bring a business sensibility to meetings filled with career government workers.
But never in modern U.S. history has the office intersected so broadly and deeply with the financial interests of the commerce secretary’s own family, according to interviews with ethics lawyers and historians.
Since February, Kyle Lutnick and his younger brother Brandon, 27, have helped run a network of companies under the corporate umbrella of Cantor Fitzgerald L.P. The companies, led by their father until this year, include the Wall Street investment firm Cantor, the securities brokerage BGC Group and the real estate company Newmark Group.
Brandon is the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., and Kyle is the executive vice chairman. The sons and their two younger siblings have a controlling ownership stake in all three companies in the network.
The family’s companies operate in a wide range of industries, from cryptocurrencies to data centers, that overlap with Mr. Lutnick’s work in government, raising concerns even among high-level staff members in the Commerce Department, according to five current and former officials and others familiar with the matter.
It is a blurring of lines that has become a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s second term, where top officials and their family members have retained major stakes in industries the government oversees. For months, the president’s two older sons and the sons of his Middle East adviser, Steve Witkoff, have traveled the world pursuing deals that have generated hundreds of millions in profits, at least on paper.
As for Mr. Lutnick, The Times did not find evidence that he had intervened in policy discussions with the intention of driving business to his family. But as he promoted data center construction, business has boomed at the Lutnick companies.
Newmark recently announced that it had completed more than $25 billion of data center deals in the past 12 months, taking a small cut in fees on each transaction. “We are having our best year ever,” Brandon Lutnick said in October at a conference in Switzerland.
The White House and the Commerce Department said in statements that Mr. Lutnick had fulfilled his ethics requirements and took them seriously.
“The fact of the matter is that the only special interest guiding Secretary Lutnick and the rest of the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman.
Representatives for Cantor and Newmark said the firms had business expertise and relationships that long predated Mr. Lutnick’s role in the administration.
Newmark’s chief executive, Barry Gosin, said in a statement that the company was the industry leader in raising capital and leasing for data centers.
“Newmark’s data center advisory work is independent of governmental and other private activities,” Mr. Gosin said. “Our success in this sector reflects the optimal outcomes we deliver for our clients.”
‘Enough Money’
Howard Lutnick first drew international attention in 2001, when 658 employees of Cantor, including his younger brother, were killed in the attacks on the World Trade Center. Mr. Lutnick was not at work that morning because he was dropping off Kyle for the first day of kindergarten.
Over the next two decades, he rebuilt the business in the wake of the tragedy. It now has more than 13,000 employees, and has expanded into new areas of the finance world, after acquiring Newmark in 2011.
At times, Mr. Lutnick has pushed boundaries and found his companies in the cross hairs of law enforcement. Cantor and affiliates agreed to pay more than $50 million over the last decade to settle at least eight separate investigations of illegal gambling and money laundering, incomplete, false or misleading statements in financial filings, and other issues, enforcement records show. In some cases, the firms settled without admitting or denying wrongdoing.
When Mr. Trump nominated him to lead the Commerce Department, Mr. Lutnick noted that at the age of 63, he wanted to serve the nation. “I’ve made enough money in my life,” he said at his confirmation hearing.
Mr. Lutnick has said he eliminated any ethics issues by turning over his ownership stake of the companies to his children, a process he announced in May, with an agreement that excluded him from any profits or losses after that date.
He has also claimed that he does not speak to his sons about their work. “I would love to talk to them about it, but I’m not allowed,” Mr. Lutnick said on a podcast in March.
The actual transfer of his ownership stake was not completed until early October, meaning he continued to have a financial interest in parts of the family’s business while he was commerce secretary, with his name on filings in full view of any client.
Until his divestment was completed, the Trump administration granted Mr. Lutnick an ethics waiver. That permitted him to participate in certain policy matters that might benefit the firms, while prohibiting him from working on specific deals in which they were involved.
Three ethics lawyers interviewed by The Times said it was not clear whether Mr. Lutnick had violated federal ethics rules or the terms of his waiver. But they said the Lutnick family’s connections to the same deals in both government and private spheres — like its involvement on different sides of Fermi’s data center project — raised questions about whether Mr. Lutnick was doing enough to distance himself from possible ethical conflicts.
“If there is a cloud of distrust over whether the action of that official is aimed at the public interest versus their family’s own interest, that’s a problem,” Kedric Payne, general counsel at the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center, an ethics group, said after reviewing documents at the request of The Times. “You’re going to create a risk that the public will just start to really lose trust in the government.”
Pressuring the Emiratis
Artificial intelligence has become a vital engine of the U.S. economy in recent years, drawing hundreds of billions of dollars in investment from around the world. Much of that money has flowed into data centers — sprawling facilities that sit on vast swaths of land and run industrial-grade computers that power A.I.
So it is no surprise that major commercial real estate brokers like Newmark were attracted to the sector.
In 2023, when Mr. Lutnick was the company’s chairman, Newmark expanded its team of investment bankers specializing in data centers. The company helps select land for these colossal projects, find power supplies and line up billions of dollars worth of loans and other financing.
The data center boom is “a modern-day gold rush,” Chad Lavender, a top Newmark executive, said in a podcast interview in September, shortly before the company reported record earnings for the quarter. “We’re seeing a ton of activity.”
Now Mr. Lutnick is helping foster that activity from Washington. The Commerce Department is seeking to accelerate data center construction with tax breaks, grants and permits to build new power sources to fuel the facilities.
Mr. Lutnick has also repeatedly pressed foreign nations to send chunks of their own money to help build data center projects in the United States, at the same time that his family’s company serves as one of the data center industry’s leading deal makers, earning tens of millions in fees.
Among the nations that Mr. Lutnick has pressured is the United Arab Emirates.
This spring, the Emiratis approached the Trump White House, requesting access to advanced U.S.-made computer chips, which are crucial to the Emirates’ ambitions of dominating the A.I. industry.
It was a controversial ask.
During the Biden administration, the United States had established strict controls to limit access to the chips, fearing that the Emiratis might share them with China and allow the Chinese to create sophisticated weapons that could be turned on U.S. soldiers. Even some within Mr. Trump’s administration were reluctant to give the Emirates unfettered access to the most advanced chips.
Mr. Lutnick was open to exporting chips, with the right safeguards in place. But his position gave him the power to say “no” and the Emiratis knew it. That is because the Commerce Department oversees the nation’s export licenses.
So he made clear that he wanted the Emiratis to commit billions of dollars to the construction of data centers in the United States in return for the chips, according to administration officials involved in the process.
“You will invest in America and build data centers in America for an equal amount of chips,” Mr. Lutnick said, describing the terms of the deal with the Emiratis during Senate testimony in June.
Eventually the chips deal was approved. Newmark’s clients are one of the possible beneficiaries.
Early this year, the Emirates agreed to commit money to help build the U.S. portion of a global network of data centers. The flagship site of this network, named after the 1994 sci-fi movie “Stargate,” is rising in Abilene, Texas.
Newmark has helped finance construction of the Abilene facility, soon to become one of the largest data centers in the country. The firm brokered more than $9.4 billion in loans this year for a partnership working on the project.
The Emirati money ultimately might not be used on the Abilene data center, executives involved in the effort said. But it is already helping finance other Stargate sites.
Deals have also been struck with Saudi Arabia to invest at least $20 billion in energy and data center projects in the United States, helping bring yet more business to the real estate brokers who structure financing for these projects, though there is no indication whether it will benefit Newmark specifically.
A Commerce Department spokesman said Mr. Lutnick did not pressure Middle East partners to fund specific projects, just to spend money on data centers somewhere in the United States.
A similar instance of overlaps played out again in July.
That month, Mr. Lutnick joined Mr. Trump in Pittsburgh, boasting about the billions of dollars that private companies are spending on a slate of data centers, including a giant project in Lancaster, Pa.
“The A.I. revolution will change the way the world works, and we cannot lose,” Mr. Lutnick said at the event. “The Trump administration will not let us lose.”
What he did not mention was that Newmark was involved in the Lancaster project. A few weeks after Mr. Lutnick’s appearance in Pennsylvania, the company announced it had brokered a $4 billion joint venture to build a “state-of-the-art A.I. data center campus” there.
A Commerce Department spokesman said Mr. Lutnick had no role in any of the individual deals that he promoted in Pennsylvania, and attended the event simply to support the industry.
Pressuring the Koreans
The intersection of Mr. Lutnick’s work as commerce secretary and his sons’ as data center deal makers is most apparent in the Fermi America project in Amarillo.
Fermi was co-founded in January by Rick Perry, the former Texas governor who was Mr. Trump’s first-term energy secretary, and Mr. Neugebauer, a major Republican donor who has supported Mr. Trump. The company has not yet generated any revenue.
This year, Mr. Neugebauer turned to Kyle and Brandon Lutnick to help Fermi raise $107.6 million as an early step in plans to build the President Donald J. Trump Advanced Energy and Intelligence Campus, which would be powered in part by nuclear energy.
Mr. Neugebauer said he chose Newmark because of the expertise of its staff, not its connection to the commerce secretary. He said he knew that seeking favors would most likely backfire.
“Was never going to help me,” he said. “Makes it harder.”
In July, Mr. Neugebauer gave a tour of the Texas construction site to Kyle Lutnick, a Stanford graduate who has worked as a D.J. under the stage name Kxtz. Mr. Neugebauer said that he gave Kyle and other visitors Fermi-branded cowboy hats, and that Kyle later texted a picture of himself with the hat.
Soon Mr. Neugebauer was also engaging with Kyle’s father. Shortly after the Texas tour, Mr. Lutnick announced that South Korea had agreed to a trade deal that would funnel $350 billion into the United States.
Mr. Neugebauer coveted a piece of those investments.
His plan was to get the South Korean government, with the support of the Trump administration, to help finance a nuclear power plant to fuel his Amarillo data center. Components for the plant would be supplied by Doosan Enerbility, a South Korean industrial giant.
In August, Mr. Lutnick appeared alongside Mr. Neugebauer during a U.S.-Korean business summit at the historic Willard InterContinental hotel, where Fermi and Doosan announced plans to collaborate.
Mr. Neugebauer and his Doosan counterpart posed for a photo holding their memorandum of understanding, flanked by Mr. Lutnick and a Korean government official.
“You’re going to see a national and economic security fund built with the Japanese money, the Korean money and other countries’ money,” Mr. Lutnick said on CNBC the day after the event.
Days after the Doosan announcement, Fermi unveiled its financing deal for the Amarillo project, with both Newmark and Cantor listed as advisers. The companies were paid $6 million for this work, according to a financial filing.
In a bigger coup for the Lutnick companies, Cantor jointly managed an initial public offering of Fermi’s stock in early October that valued the company at more than $12.5 billion. Millions of dollars in additional fees flowed to Cantor.
“Honored to co-lead the I.P.O. for such an innovative and inspiring company Fermi America,” Kyle Lutnick posted on social media at the closing of that deal.
Ben Kass, a Commerce Department spokesman, said no decision had been made on where to allocate the funds South Korea had agreed to spend in the United States. So far, he said, the department is planning to use part of the money to promote U.S. shipbuilding, rather than nuclear power.
Still, Mr. Kass added, the final terms of the trade deal remain under negotiation.
At a recent meeting in Washington, Mr. Neugebauer pressed Deputy Commerce Secretary Paul Dabbar to direct money from the Korean trade deal toward Fermi’s nuclear plant.
Mr. Neugebauer has an important ally in Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas and the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. Fermi is also seeking low-interest financing from the Energy Department, which is offering billions of dollars in nuclear-energy loans.
“Toby has been a close friend of mine for 20 years,” Mr. Cruz said last week, at a Cantor-sponsored conference at the Ritz-Carlton in Miami Beach, after he wrapped Mr. Neugebauer in a bear hug by the pool. “It is a powerful proposal to bring billions of investments to Texas and create a whole lot of jobs.”
Mr. Neugebauer remains optimistic that the Commerce Department will help him get the Korean funding.
“Do I think it probably gets done?” Mr. Neugebauer said. “Yes.”
He added, “We got no special treatment.”
Cade Metz contributed reporting. Susan C. Beachy, Kitty Bennett and Laine Cibulskis contributed research.
Eric Lipton is a Times investigative reporter, who digs into a broad range of topics from Pentagon spending to toxic chemicals.
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