No Data Centers in the Desert: The Wilderness Society Demands a Moratorium on AI Builds on Federal Land

One of America’s oldest conservation groups has drawn a line in the desert sand. On Monday, The Wilderness Society formally called for a moratorium on AI data centers on federal lands, citing concerns over water use, electricity demand, wildlife habitat, and public access. The demand lands as the Trump administration is actively considering permits for several data center developments on lands managed by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), according to federal land records reviewed by Reuters.

The clash was inevitable. The United States is in the middle of the largest data center construction boom in its history, driven almost entirely by demand for AI training and inference. Private land near substations and fiber routes in hotspots like Northern Virginia has largely been picked over, and grid interconnection queues stretch for years. That has pushed developers toward an untapped frontier: the hundreds of millions of acres the federal government manages across the West, where land is cheap, remote, and — under current policy — increasingly available.

What the Wilderness Society is asking for

The group’s position is straightforward: public lands should remain focused on recreation, conservation, and public access, and there should be a pause before large-scale industrial development tied to AI is allowed on federally managed land.

The specific concerns are concrete rather than rhetorical:

• Water. Data centers with liquid cooling lose millions of gallons a year to evaporation, and many western basins are already over-appropriated. In the driest states in the country, every acre-foot diverted to an industrial campus is an acre-foot that is not flowing to rivers, ranches, or downstream cities.
• Electricity. A single hyperscale campus can draw more power than the town next to it. The Wilderness Society argues that federal land should not become the path of least resistance for energy-intensive projects that regional grids have not planned for.
• Habitat and access. Fragmenting undeveloped land with industrial security perimeters, substations, and transmission corridors damages wildlife connectivity and locks the public out of places that were previously open.

BLM officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The agency manages roughly a tenth of America’s land base, primarily in Western states — a footprint so large that even a small fraction of it being designated for data centers would represent an enormous amount of industrial capacity.

The Nevada precedent that lit the fuse

The proximate trigger for the moratorium call is a small project with an outsized precedent. In June 2026, the BLM approved the Townsite Data Center near Boulder City, Nevada — believed to be the first data center ever approved on BLM-managed public land.

What made the approval remarkable was how it happened. The developer, Townsite Solar 2, LLC, originally won approval in 2023 to build a solar and battery storage project on the parcel. Earlier this year it amended its application to build a data center instead — and the BLM approved the switch without a new environmental review and without seeking public comment, using a “Determination of NEPA Adequacy” that transferred the old analysis to the new project. The agency’s justification: a solar farm and a data center are “substantially the same,” citing similarities in acreage, perimeter, construction time, and the size and shape of the facilities.

A data center consuming more electricity than the entire neighboring community of Boulder City, approved on the strength of an environmental review written for a project that generates electricity — critics, including former senior BLM officials, have called that an “extraordinary and liberal interpretation” of existing law. Boulder City itself was blindsided. “We’ve had no conversations, there’s been no chance for the community or for the city to provide any input to the federal government,” city spokesperson Lisa LaPlante said. The Boulder City Council voted unanimously to appeal the approval, and a review panel has since placed a temporary halt on the contested project.

Reporting by Heatmap, followed up by the Center for Western Priorities, added a lobbying dimension: Arevon Energy, a financial backer of the project, hired the Bernhardt Group — the firm led by former Interior Secretary David Bernhardt — around the time Townsite Solar 2 was preparing to pivot from solar to data center. Federal disclosures show the firm registered to lobby for Arevon in November 2025 and has collected at least $160,000 since. Arevon says it did not hire the firm for this project and did not direct the conversion.

Congress is already circling

The Wilderness Society is not alone. Representative Rashida Tlaib has introduced H.R. 9939, the No AI Data Centers on Federal Lands Act, which would permanently ban large-scale AI data centers on land owned or managed by the federal government. The bill is a long shot in the current Congress, but it signals that the politics of AI infrastructure are shifting: what was recently a local zoning fight is now a national question about who pays the costs of the AI buildout.

At least twelve AI data centers or related infrastructure projects are being proposed for federal land, according to tracking by public-lands advocates — a pipeline that would have been unthinkable two years ago.

The wider squeeze

The moratorium demand fits into a broader pattern of pushback against the physical footprint of AI. Local moratoriums on new data center construction have multiplied across the country. The White House, for its part, has championed rapid expansion of AI infrastructure, describing data centers as critical to economic growth and technological competitiveness — and President Trump has sought to expand a range of industries on public lands, from mining to oil and gas.

That leaves the BLM squeezed between an administration that wants speed and constituencies — hunters, anglers, tribes, local governments, conservation groups — that want process. The Townsite fight suggests the agency has so far chosen speed. The Wilderness Society’s moratorium call is an attempt to force the opposite choice before the pipeline of projects grows too large to stop.

The stakes extend beyond one desert parcel. If the “substantially the same” rationale survives the Boulder City appeal, it hands developers a template: seek federal approvals for renewable projects on public land, then swap in a data center once the environmental review is locked. Conservation groups call it bait-and-switch; the industry calls it efficient permitting. Which reading wins may determine whether America’s public lands become a meaningful part of the AI buildout — or remain off limits, forcing the industry to compete for scarce private land and grid capacity like everyone else.