The Trump administration has likened the need to build out the nation’s artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure to the Manhattan Project, the World War II effort that produced the world’s first atomic bomb.
The White House’s point person on the effort, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, has spoken of the “AI arms race” with China as an existential issue for the nation.
“AI is manufacturing intelligence, and, if we don’t manufacture more intelligence than our adversaries, it affects every job, every company and every industry,” he said during his U.S. Senate confirmation hearing in January 2025.
But advancing the administration’s AI objectives also could benefit Burgum’s own finances.
Much of his wealth is held in Arthur Ventures, an investment firm he co-founded, according to his 2026 financial disclosure form, which has not been previously reported.
Between $18.1 million and $64.4 million of those investments are in AI companies, according to an analysis of the companies’ marketing materials shared with ProPublica by public lands advocacy group Save Our Parks. (Government financial disclosure forms allow filers to report wide ranges instead of the specific value of their investments.)
Burgum made his fortune 25 years ago when he sold a software company to Microsoft and has remained heavily invested in technology. In the year before joining the administration, when he was North Dakota’s governor, he made between $2.1 million and $11 million in capital gains from AI-related investments, Save Our Parks’ analysis showed.
In 2025, he sold millions of dollars of stocks and equity in AI companies, bringing in capital gains worth between $2.5 million and $15.1 million.
In the ethics agreement Burgum signed as part of his Senate confirmation, he agreed to resign from his positions at Arthur but not give up his financial interests there.
“Secretary Burgum has met his federal ethics and financial disclosure obligations,” a U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) spokesperson told ProPublica in a statement.
“Any suggestion that his office decisions are driven by personal investments are false and completely unsupported.”
Officials across the Trump administration also stand to profit from the White House’s support for AI and data centers.
For example, 380 of President Donald Trump’s political appointees or their spouses hold stocks or have other financial connections to Nvidia, which has become the world’s most valuable company thanks to the data center boom.
More than 320 have ties to Alphabet, Google’s parent company, which plans to spend at least $195 billion this year building data centers and AI-related technology.
And more than 240 are invested in or otherwise have financial ties to Meta platforms, which is developing a “fleet” of data centers. This is according to an analysis of records added last week to the Trump Team Financials database developed by ProPublica to make accessible the financial disclosures of administration officials.
Federal officials’ activities are governed by a criminal statute that sets a high burden of proof for potential wrongdoing — for example, approving permits for a company in which they are substantially invested, multiple ethics professors and lawyers told ProPublica. They said that Burgum’s investments appear to be acceptable under this law.
But ethics rules that do not carry criminal penalties also apply, explained Cynthia Brown, senior ethics counsel with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a government watchdog group.
These rules, she said, “instruct officials not to work on anything that would create the appearance of a conflict of interest.”
She said this would include Burgum’s support for data centers on federal land while holding investments in AI.
Richard Painter, a law professor at the University of Minnesota and President George W. Bush’s chief ethics lawyer, agreed that Burgum should avoid making decisions benefiting an industry in which he is heavily invested.
“I, as the ethics lawyer, would insist he stay away from it,” Painter said. “In the Bush administration, the answer would’ve been ‘he has to recuse,’ I can guarantee you that.”
A review of recent DOI secretaries’ financial holdings suggests it’s common to have some potential conflicts, but Trump’s appointees are more heavily invested in the industries they oversee than their predecessors.
