New U.S. Bill Seeks Permanent Ban on AI Data Centers Across Public Lands

There is a kind of American land that no corporation can buy. The deserts, the forests, the sagebrush basins, all of it held in trust for every person who might someday stand in it. It is the closest thing we have to a shared inheritance, and the most powerful industry on Earth has started looking at it as real estate. Patrick Donnelly watched it happen up close. In June 2026, the Bureau of Land Management signed off on the Townsite Data Center, a 167 megawatt computing facility planned for the Eldorado Valley outside Boulder City, Nevada, on federal land that had originally been approved for a solar farm.

There was no fresh environmental review. The agency decided a data center was close enough to a solar farm that none was needed. “It’s an outrage that the Trump administration is giving away our public lands to hedge funds for data centers,” said Donnelly, of the Center for Biological Diversity, which is fighting the project. He was not the only one who felt the ground shift. On July 23, 2026, a bill arrived in Congress that answers projects like Townsite in the most absolute language available to a lawmaker. Not a pause. Not a study. An eviction notice.

Thirty Days to Pack Up the Servers

The bill is H.R. 9939, the No AI Data Centers on Federal Lands Act, introduced by Michigan Representative Rashida Tlaib. Its official title runs one line: “To prohibit Artificial Intelligence Data Centers on Federal land.”

It would permanently ban the construction or operation of large AI data centers on land owned or managed by the federal government, military bases included. Land held in trust for tribes is exempt. The ban reaches the machinery behind the machines too, covering “transmission lines, power substations, natural gas plants, natural gas pipelines, backup generation facilities, and water pipelines and cooling infrastructure.”

A covered facility is one used to develop or run AI models at scale, or one drawing more than 20 megawatts with the high density racks or liquid cooling that mark AI work. That is not your local server closet. That is the new generation of computing campuses rising across the country.

And here is the part with teeth. Within 30 days of enactment, federal agencies would have to shut down qualifying facilities already operating, halt construction on ones underway, and begin removing them. The land underneath would then be cleaned up and restored under the same federal law that governs Superfund sites.

The headline’s “all public lands” means exactly that federal estate, the land the government owns or manages on behalf of everyone. And “immediately” has a number attached: one month.

The Desert Valley That Lit the Fuse

To understand why this bill exists, look back at Boulder City.

The Townsite project, developed by a subsidiary of Houston based Skylar Capital Management, took over ground that had been cleared for solar panels. The water tells the story of what changed. Building the solar project would have required about 25 acre feet of water. The data center needs roughly 560 acre feet, drawn from within the parched Colorado River Basin.

So the appeals came fast. The Center for Biological Diversity and the Sierra Club petitioned the Interior Board of Land Appeals for a stay in July 2026. Boulder City’s own attorney filed a separate appeal, even though the project promised the town about 2.3 million dollars a year. A town willing to fight its own windfall tells you how much this ground means to the people who live beside it.

Sierra Club leaders in Nevada warned that if the approval stands unchallenged, “it will become the blueprint for data centers” across the public lands of the American West.

Washington Is Racing the Other Way

Here is what makes this fight remarkable: the federal government is sprinting in the opposite direction.

In April 2025, the Department of Energy identified 16 federal sites for fast tracked data center construction, aiming for operations by the end of 2027. Energy Secretary Chris Wright framed the stakes in wartime terms: “The global race for AI dominance is the next Manhattan project, and with President Trump’s leadership and the innovation of our National Labs, the United States can and will win.”

The announcements kept coming. A project at the Paducah site in Kentucky, unveiled on July 29, 2026, carries an investment north of 100 billion dollars and promises 8,000 construction jobs. In Ohio, a 10 gigawatt complex at the Portsmouth site has been branded the world’s largest AI data center. Kentucky Representative Andy Barr called the Paducah project “historic.”

One government. Two visions of the same ground. Only one can win.

The Numbers Feeding the Fear

The anxiety underneath this bill is not abstract. Data centers consumed about 4.4 percent of all U.S. electricity in 2023, and a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report projects that figure could reach 6.7 to 12 percent by 2028.

Tlaib’s office put the sharpest number forward, saying AI data centers “can increase energy costs by as much as 267%.”

That figure deserves honest handling. It traces to a Bloomberg analysis showing wholesale electricity prices rose as much as 267 percent over five years at grid locations near heavy data center activity. Wholesale prices are what utilities pay, not what lands on your monthly bill, and fact checkers have dinged politicians for blurring that line.

The truth sits in the middle, and it is still sobering. The pressure on the grid is real, the direction is up, and the people living next to these facilities rarely got a vote.

A Long Shot That Still Matters

By every conventional measure, this bill is a long shot. It has five cosponsors, none of them from Nevada, and it faces a Congress and an administration that treat AI buildout as a national security priority. Critics of a ban argue it would slow investment and hand an advantage to rivals in the global AI race. The legislation has not passed and is not law.

But long shot bills have a way of drawing the lines that later fights are fought along. This one forces a question no committee can table forever: should land held in trust for every American power server farms owned by a few?

What the Land Is For

Donnelly answered that question the way conservationists have answered it for a century. “Public lands are for wildlife and clean water, for recreation and spiritual renewal,” he said.

The servers will get built somewhere. The models will get trained. What this bill actually contests is smaller and larger at the same time: whether the one category of American ground that belongs to everyone should be spent on them.

A country decides what its shared land is for one valley at a time. And there is a quiet hope inside this fight: a small city, two conservation groups, and a handful of lawmakers are making that decision out loud, in the open, where everyone can watch. Land held in trust stays held only as long as someone insists on it. Right now, someone is insisting.