Doug Burgum gave public-land managers three days to make room for AI

The AI buildout is running out of politically willing neighbours, so the US government is offering it a different kind of address: land all of us technically own.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum's Bureau of Land Management has asked its state directors to identify public land ripe for data center development, and gave them three days to produce the lists, according to two people familiar with the request, as reported by The Washington Sun. The finished inventories went to Interior Department leadership. A former BLM official involved in the discussions said the issue was flagged as a top priority. The order traces back to President Trump's July 2025 directive to accelerate federal permitting for data center infrastructure, and it is happening quietly, away from the county-commission hearings where these projects normally die.

The practical obstacles are the interesting part. BLM land is remote — usually nowhere near the substations and water supplies a data center needs. The bureau has shed roughly half its staff since 2025 through a hiring freeze and separation incentives, and one of its land and realty divisions was running at 50% vacancy — exactly the offices that would have to write the environmental reviews. Those reviews also require expertise nobody on the remaining payroll has, because nobody has yet written a NEPA analysis template for an AI campus. Mary Jo Rugwell, a former BLM state director who now leads the Public Lands Foundation, put the trade-off bluntly: "I think we're just bending knee to the tech oligarchs and letting them do whatever they need to do."

Burgum's calendar shows how close the pipeline runs. A Washington Sun review of his 2025 meetings found a spring conversation with Amazon CEO Andy Jassy about permitting and infrastructure "to support data center growth," a July meeting with Brendan Bechtel — whose firm builds AI data centers with Nvidia — and, across February and March, sessions with the CEOs of Shell, Chevron, ExxonMobil and BP, all of which are selling power or generation to the buildout. The Interior secretary, who also chairs the National Energy Dominance Council, calls data centers "intelligence factories." Interior spokesperson Aubrie Spady said industry engagement is part of Burgum's job; BLM did not respond to a request for comment.

Expect the legal fight to be the headline next. On September 1 the Interior Board of Land Appeals granted a temporary stay on what would have been the first data center built on public land, near Boulder City, Nevada, finding the environmental groups were "likely to prevail" in their claim that the bureau had approved the project without a proper review and risked irreparable harm to Mojave desert tortoise habitat. The same board is now being asked to bless a far larger program. We've been tracking the other side of this — the local resistance — in The data center backlash is the new NIMBY tax on AI and in US data center bans top 500 as New York, Texas push back.

What to watch: whether Interior publishes the state lists, and whether a single appealed project can stall a federal siting program.

Should hyperscalers get fast-tracked onto public land if the grid benefit is real, or is federal land the wrong place to solve a power shortage? Tell us in the comments.

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