There Are 0 Data Centers on Public Lands. Trump Is Considering Building 12.

Photo: Part of AWS’s us-west-2 availability zone, showing three datacenters with a fourth under construction – August 11, 2023. Photo credit: Tedder via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0 (resized photo to fit). Article by Sharon Zhang. Truthout – September 18, 2026.

The Trump administration is reportedly considering a dozen data center projects to be built on public lands, a plan that would grant tech firms massive swaths of protected lands as they expand AI projects already sharply criticized for outsized use of public resources. The proposals under consideration are spread across six states — Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Wyoming — and would encompass at least 17,600 acres of public lands, according to records reported on Friday by The Washington Sun. The projects aren’t posted publicly on the Bureau of Land Management’s (BLM) website, as they are evidently in the early stages and not yet subject to the public comment process. The publication also reports that local officials and advocates in at least five of the states were unaware of the proposed projects. […]

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