A little over a year ago, on July 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order announcing that “my Administration will utilize federally owned land and resources for the expeditious and orderly development of data centers.”
And indeed, just last month, on June 26, 2026, the Trump administration approved the first-ever commercial AI data center on public land.
The Townsite Data Center would be located on 88.5 acres of federal land managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) in Eldorado Valley. It would sit within the city limits of Boulder City, Nevada, a historic community of fewer than 15,000 people southeast of Las Vegas, often referred to as the “gateway to the Hoover Dam.”
The facility would draw as much as 167 megawatts of electricity—more than Boulder City itself consumes—and place two warehouse-scale buildings, parking lots, an electrical substation, battery storage, backup generators, powerlines, and a brand new road in the middle of desert tortoise habitat.
And yet, Bruce Sillitoe, the BLM’s Las Vegas Field Office Manager, approved the AI data center in June without preparing a new environmental assessment or soliciting any public comment.
Instead, the agency relied on a prior analysis conducted for a completely different proposal: a solar-energy and battery-storage project called Townsite Solar 2, which was first proposed by the same Houston-based company that now wants to build a data center there instead.
The maps below, obtained from the BLM’s Plan of Development, show the location of the proposed Townsite Data Center relative to Las Vegas and Lake Mead, and Boulder City. “Development of data center and AI infrastructure is a top priority [of] the United States Government,” the Plan of Development says.
Hellbound and Down 