These 5 Senators Collectively Have Millions Riding On The AI Data Center Boom

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1:01Hi, everybody. I'm Brittany Lewis, a breaking news reporter here at Forbes. Joining me once again is my Forbes colleague, reporter Kyle Kahn-Mullins. Kyle, thanks so much for coming on.

1:12Kyle Khan-Mullins: Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks for having me. As the AI boom continues to grow, feelings towards data centers have become increasingly negative. Criticisms about these facilities range anywhere from their high costs to their potential environmental impacts. and the majority of Americans oppose data center construction in their communities. And especially with an election coming up, we're hearing candidates and lawmakers touch on AI and data centers while stumping on the campaign trail. You're reporting, though, that stock portfolios of some elected officials, both Democrats and Republicans, are riding on the data center build-out.

1:46You looked at senators specifically for this piece. So to start off this conversation here, could you walk us through the process of how you found out who has the most to gain and lose financially from data centers.

1:59Kyle Khan-Mullins: Absolutely, Brittany. We kind of started with a basic question, right? The data center build out, it's transforming the US economy. It's transforming politics in places where data centers are being built. Is it also transforming certain politicians' wallets? That's kind of our biggest question. So politicians have to disclose their investments in these ranges, in financial disclosure documents. They're public, so we know if a politician owns, say, between$15 ,000 and$50 ,000. That's one of the ranges of stock in NVIDIA, the big chip company. And that includes things that they own. It also includes things that their spouse owns, and it includes anything that their dependent children own.

2:38Kyle Khan-Mullins: So just remember that when we're talking about these figures, we're kind of talking about the politician's household, not necessarily just the politician individually. So what we did is we downloaded all of the most recent disclosures for every single member of Congress, along with any reports that they filed more recently that show more recent stock transactions. And then, somewhat ironically here, right, we used AI to scrape all of those disclosures for any investments that might potentially in some universe be related to data centers. And then, from there, we manually reviewed all of the candidate investments to help determine which companies we should actually include in our final analysis.

3:15Kyle Khan-Mullins: You throw it on a spreadsheet, that's how we get our rankings. And I should say, when we're talking about these rankings, we're using the minimums, so the bottom of the ranges that these politicians are disclosing. So if a politician discloses between$15 ,000 and$50 ,000 of stock in a particular company, the rankings are calculated using the$15 ,000, the bottom of that range. So we're being more conservative here. And I like that question that you posed, data centers, are they transforming politicians' wallets by how much and who? So I want to look big picture here. What exactly did you find? Let's start a little more broadly.

3:50How many senators have data center linked investments? And overall, on average, how much are they worth?

3:57Kyle Khan-Mullins: So we found 26 senators, a little over a quarter of the chamber, with data center linked investments. And overall, that means that we found at least$7 million worth of data center adjacent investments in the Senate. But you're going to remember, that's the minimum. So the number is probably far higher than that. And I should note here that our definition of data center adjacent investments, we excluded a lot of companies that you might think of initially. We didn't count things like Apple or Google or Meta because we felt that those businesses were too diversified to count as data center investments.

4:30Kyle Khan-Mullins: So we really wanted to focus on companies that either own data centers, operate data centers, or are really, really key parts of the AI data center build out. So that should give you a sense of the types of companies that we're talking about. Now let's start naming some of these politicians here in the Senate. I want to talk about the top five and if you could break down their investments a little bit. And we're going to start with the senators on the left because the top spot here is a Democrat from Rhode Island. What can you tell us? Progressive's accident response can contact emergency services if you're in a major accident.

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6:01Kyle Khan-Mullins: Yeah, our top-ranking senator is Sheldon Whitehouse. He's a Democrat from Rhode Island. He's got between$2.1 and$8.6 million in data center-linked investments. So we're using that$2.1 as our cutoff for the rankings. And then number three is Ron Wyden. He's a Democrat from Oregon with at least$1.3 million. And I say$1.3 million because one of his biggest assets is just listed as a million plus. And so it doesn't actually have an upper bound. He theoretically could have millions of dollars worth of that. We don't know for sure, obviously. Now, for these two, Sheldon Whitehouse, Ron Wyden, we're talking about companies like NVIDIA.

6:35Kyle Khan-Mullins: The chip maker, I think it's the largest company in the world. And then other companies that are sort of fueling the data center boom, Cisco, Micron, Lamb Research, Oracle. These are companies that, again, not all of them operate data centers. In fact, most of them don't. But they're providing the components that are necessary for data centers to operate. Their stocks are often up like crazy the past couple of years because their market has expanded so much with the build out of these data centers. So that should give you a sense of sort of what we're dealing with here. Now, let's go to the right.

7:05What about Republicans? Who rounds out the top five there?

7:09Kyle Khan-Mullins: Yeah, we've got three Republicans in the top five here in the Senate. So Oklahoma Senator Allen Armstrong, he's number two. He's got between$1.8 and$7.5 million worth of data center adjacent investments. He's the appointed senator who's finishing out the year in Mark Wayne Mullen's Senate seat after Mark Wayne Mullen became DHS secretary. And notably, Armstrong not running for re-election. He was only appointed in, I think, March of this year, and yeah, you know, he's going to be finishing out the year, and then he'll be done in the Senate. The other two Republicans are Bill Haggerty in Tennessee.

7:41Kyle Khan-Mullins: He's got between$500 ,000 and$1 ,000 ,000. He's known as sort of a pro-tech, pro-crypto senator, so I'm not totally shocked that he's interested in data center investing as well. And then Susan Collins in Maine is number five, with between$300 ,000 and$800 ,000 worth of data center adjacent investments. She would point out that it is her husband who owns those shares. And again, it's an interesting collection of companies between these Republicans, showing sort of the breadth of the data center boom. Broadcom, Cisco, Ecolab, American Tower, Amphenol, Caterpillar. These are all companies that are helping drive the build out.

8:16Kyle Khan-Mullins: And again, most of the time, do not operate data centers themselves. Like I said at the top of the conversation, AI and data centers, they are starting to become real issues on the campaign trail for a lot of politicians. And certainly from the people I talk to, it's going to be an even bigger issue come 2028. So at least publicly, what are these lawmakers saying about data centers? Are they in step with what the American people feel, which is largely negative feelings towards them? So you can already see a partisan and split sort of developing on this issue. Republicans are for the most part kind of full steam ahead.

8:53Kyle Khan-Mullins: Data centers are seen as opportunities for job growth, economic growth, and they want to support AI. That's an industry the president has embraced. It's an industry that's now closely tied to the Republican party, but Republicans are starting to show some interest in some regulation. You'll especially see interest in regulation on electricity prices. A lot of Republicans talk about how they don't feel like data center, when a data center is built in an area, electricity prices should be, and electricity price increases should be passed on to, you know, other consumers in the area. Democrats are much more concerned, I would say, on average, about the AI build-out.

9:29Kyle Khan-Mullins: Most are not anti-data center per se, but they want more transparency, they want more regulation when it comes to water consumption, electricity consumption, they want more local input, they want labor, you know, strong labor regulations regarding the construction, fewer tax breaks for the construction of these things, all that kind of stuff. And interestingly, in this sort of top five analysis we did, you can see Susan Collins, who, you know, in keeping with her reputation as kind of a moderate Republican, she kind of takes a middle-of-the-road position. She's not quite as gung-ho on data centers as the other Republicans on the list, and she's also not quite as far on the regulation side as the Democrats on the list.

10:07Kyle Khan-Mullins: She talks about being in a race with China. We have to win that race. Notably, Susan Collins also in a very tough reelection race right now. The only one in the top five in a tough reelection race. The main Democratic Party sent me a statement that said that they feel her data center investments show she can't be trusted to regulate these types of data centers. Her spokespeople did not reply to a request for comment on that. Kyle, I have to ask probably the most obvious question here, and that is, is this a conflict of interest? Because collectively, you see these senators, both Republicans and Democrats together, have invested millions of dollars worth in these companies.

10:44They have a real financial interest in the success of data centers. And they're the very people who are deciding on the laws regulating them.

10:52Kyle Khan-Mullins: That is the multi trillion dollar question with the whole AI data center build out, isn't it? I mean, the lawmakers who replied to my request for comment, they all deny that their investments have absolutely anything to do with their votes and anything to do with their actions as members of Congress. Some of them, they'll point out their investments are held by their spouse or they're managed by independent wealth advisors, and they will say that that gives them even more distance from the investments. So they're not even benefiting as much or they have no control over the investments. I don't know.

11:19Kyle Khan-Mullins: I talk money with my wife all the time. So whether the spouse thing gives you distance is up to the eye of the beholder there. But that is the big question, whether holding these types of investments, holding these types of stocks, does color the decisions that are being made. And it's hard to say. I think that the most obvious thing is the partisan split. But even within that partisan split, you might see people who have, you know, there are varying degrees of severity on either side on this issue. And you talk money in politics with Forbes and for Forbes. So zooming out a little bit here and when you're looking at this reporting from that lens of money in politics more broadly, what does this tell you?

12:02The fact that lawmakers are investing this much money in the AI boom and in data centers in general?

12:10Kyle Khan-Mullins: I really had two big takeaways from this reporting I've been doing. So the first is that there's a lot of potential in using AI to sort of sift through all the vast amounts of data on these disclosures. This is a little bit of inside baseball, but I never could have done this reporting just by reading these disclosures one by one, all by myself, and researching every single company individually to see if they're linked to the data centers, et cetera. Using AI streamlined that process enormously, and it really enabled us to do this analysis, which again is somewhat ironic in a story about AI data center investment.

12:43And then the second thing is this all underscores the scale of the AI data center build out.

12:51Kyle Khan-Mullins: We haven't seen an infrastructure build out like this in a very long time in this country. And there are so many companies, even ones that you wouldn't immediately think of that are benefiting from the industry. A good example is Caterpillar. They make general purpose construction equipment. Okay. Pretty straightforward, simple stuff. You wouldn't think, oh yeah, that's like a high tech, you know, company that's obviously going to be doing great with data centers. They're up 300 % in the last five years, their stock. And they don't make chips. They don't make software or anything like that. They make, you know, construction equipment.

13:22Kyle Khan-Mullins: But the build out is so large that is impacting, you know, secondary and tertiary companies like this. And it's really amazing stuff. Kyle, I always appreciate your reporting and you breaking down the numbers. Thank you so, so much for joining me. And until next time. Until next time, Brittany. Thanks again for having me.

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