Who Is The Single Biggest Data Center Investor In Congress?

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1:33Hi, 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.

1:43Kyle Khan-Mullins: Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks for having me. Recent polling shows that there's been growing bipartisan discontent when it comes to the construction of data centers. And those criticisms are coming at a time when people inside the AI industry have been sounding the alarm on the technology safety risks. A former researcher who worked at both OpenAI and Anthropic recently warned about AI's potential to, quote, kill us all. That's what he said. And leaders of some of the frontier companies are saying, hey, we need some guardrails here because this technology, it has the potential to pose a real existential threat to humanity.

2:17But you're reporting that some members of Congress could get rich off data centers. So to start off the conversation, could you walk us through the process of how you found out who in Congress has the most to gain and lose financially from data centers?

2:32Kyle Khan-Mullins: Absolutely, Brittany. We really started with a basic question. The data center build out, it's transforming the US economy, it's transforming US politics, maybe it'll kill us all, who knows. We wanted to know which politicians are potentially benefiting from the data center build out, or who would get hurt if the boom became a bust. Politicians have to disclose their investments in ranges in financial disclosure documents that are public. So we can see if a politician owns, say, between$15 ,000 and$50 ,000, that's one of the ranges of stock in, say, Nvidia, the big chip maker. And that includes things that the politician owns, that their spouse owns, and any dependent children owns.

3:13Kyle Khan-Mullins: So remember that when we're talking about all these figures that we're going to get into, we're talking about kind of the household, not just the individual lawmaker. So what we did is we downloaded all of the most recent disclosures for every member of Congress. And then we've also downloaded any reports that they've filed more recently showing more recent transactions. and ironically here we used AI to scrape all of those disclosures for any investment that might remotely be related to data centers. And from there I reviewed all of the candidate investments myself to help determine which companies we should actually include in the analysis.

3:47Kyle Khan-Mullins: We kind of threw it all into a spreadsheet that's how we got our rankings and I should say our rankings are calculated using the bottom of the ranges. So that$15 ,000 to$50 ,000 range I quoted before the rankings would be calculated using the$15 ,000 range. So AI helped you streamline this process. You reviewed it. You threw it on the spreadsheet. I want to talk about exactly what you found here. Break down the numbers a little bit. How many members of Congress have data center linked investments? And overall, how much money are they pouring into these companies? Yeah. So I published an analysis of the Senate earlier this week.

4:24Kyle Khan-Mullins: And so people can go read that. What we're talking about today is just the House of Representatives, and the House is a lot bigger than the Senate. 435 members, the Senate's got 100, right? We count hundreds of lawmakers in the House with data center adjacent investments, and we count at least $45 million worth of those investments across the whole House. And remember, that's the minimum, so the number's probably a lot higher than that. But our analysis really focused on the House, really focused for the House on the biggest investors. We really honed in on the top five to 10 for our for our main coverage here.

4:59In your piece, you cite this letter that was signed by over 100 members of the House. The overwhelming majority of them were Democrats, but a handful of Republicans signed on this letter that was dated September 18th. It was addressed to tech industry leaders and it was talking about data centers. You cited it. I want to read how it began in part, quote, we that undersigned members of the United States Congress demand the industry adoption of key standards and practices around data center development. Should you fall short of these standards and fail to provide anything other than a safe and direct benefit for the communities that house these data centers, we will reject their construction.

5:36And you pointed out there was a somewhat ironic signer of this letter. It's former House Speaker, and she's actually the biggest data center investor in all of the House. Talk to us a little bit about Nancy Pelosi's investments. I hope I don't have to cancel again tonight.

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7:11Kyle Khan-Mullins: yeah not just top in the house nancy pelosi is actually the top data center investor in all of Congress. All five of the top House members that we counted for this story, all five of the House members are above the top five senators that I examined in a previous story. So all the people we're talking about today are the top five in all of Congress. And Pelosi's investments, you asked about hers. I should say those are listed as owned and managed by her husband on her financial disclosures. They're not listed as hers. They include purchases as recent as this year. Paul Paul Pelosi was buying millions of dollars worth of stock and options in Intel, which is an American chip company in Bloom Energy.

7:50Kyle Khan-Mullins: They make fuel cells that power data centers. The biggest holding in their portfolio is a stake in Nvidia. They the big chip company, big chip maker, they're worth that stake in Nvidia is worth between six and twenty six million dollars. That's a lot of money. And while we're talking about Nancy Pelosi, I do want to stay on the left here. And if you could talk to us a little bit about those other Democratic members of the House who are investing the most in these types of companies. Who are they and what do their holdings look like? So the runner up number two, this is Cleo Fields, Representative Cleo Fields.

8:27Kyle Khan-Mullins: He's a Democrat from Louisiana. He's actually retiring this year. He got gerrymandered out of his seat. He disclosed a stake in NVIDIA. Again, this is the five trillion dollar market cap company. Their computer chips kind of power all of the data centers that we operate, or the vast majority of them. His overall data center adjacent investments are between$8.5 and$41 million. Seven to 35 of that is just his stake in NVIDIA. He also owns some stakes in the Taiwanese chip maker, TSMC, the American chip designer, AMD. So he's got this breadth of portfolio, but a big chunk of it is NVIDIA. The other two Democrats, you asked about the other Democrats in the top five.

9:07Kyle Khan-Mullins: There's two more. One is Long Island Democrat Tom Suozzi. He's got data center investments that are between$2.25 and$10.5 million. And then Los Angeles area Democrat Gil Cisneros. His holdings are worth between$2.2 and$9.4 million. They both also got big stakes in NVIDIA. You're probably noticing a pattern here. NVIDIA is showing up in all the Democrats' portfolios. Cisneros, I think, is interesting. He owns shares in companies that sort of illustrate the breadth of the data center boom. Caterpillar shares are up 300 % in five years. Parker Hannafin, they make liquid cooling equipment, other heat management stuff.

9:41Kyle Khan-Mullins: They're up 225%. Cisneros owns between$15 ,000 and$50 ,000 of both of those companies. And now, obviously, we got to turn to the right. Let's talk Republicans. Do their investments look the same? I know NVIDIA is a trend here. Who are the Republicans with the most data center linked assets? So in the House and in Congress overall, there's only one Republican in our top five. That's San Diego area Republican, Darrell Issa. He earned his high rank on the list with a single investment holding. He owns an ETF. It's the iShares semiconductor ETF, and it's worth between five and$25 million. That's it.

10:18Kyle Khan-Mullins: That's his only holding. We actually didn't count most pooled fund vehicles for this analysis, ETFs, that kind of thing. index funds. We didn't count the vast majority of them because we didn't feel it would be nice to say or fair to say, you know, oh, you own the S &P 500 and the S &P 500 has some NVIDIA in it, so therefore you're a data center investor. That doesn't make any sense. But this one, this one's pretty, pretty direct. The iShares Semiconductor ETF, all of its largest holdings are data center adjacent. Intel, AMD, Micron, NVIDIA, Broadcom. These are all companies. They're in the top part of this ETF and they're all data center adjacent.

10:55Kyle Khan-Mullins: So we counted this for the purposes of our analysis. I know a few moments ago, I did cite that letter that included Nancy Pelosi's signature that essentially put tech industry leaders on notice about data centers. But do we know how other lawmakers feel about data centers and if Nancy Pelosi has said anything publicly? Because like I said at the top, polling shows that Americans, the vast majority of them oppose data centers and their construction. Are these lawmakers publicly at least voicing any concerns about them? You can kind of see a partisan split developing on this issue. So Republicans for the most part, and I'm speaking very broadly here, are kind of full steam ahead on data centers.

11:39Kyle Khan-Mullins: They are an opportunity for jobs. They're an opportunity for economic growth. They want to support AI. That's an industry the president has embraced. And that's an industry that's very closely tied with the Republican party at this point, but Republicans do still show favoring some regulation, especially on electricity prices. Democrats, on the other hand, and again, I'm speaking very broadly here, more concerned about the build-out. They're not anti-data center completely, although almost everyone who is anti-data center is on the Democratic side, but most Democrats, they want more transparency and they want more regulation when it comes to water consumption, electricity consumption.

12:14Kyle Khan-Mullins: They want more local input on whether a data center is built in a particular place. They want fewer tax breaks for the construction of those data centers. They want strong labor laws for the workers who are building the data centers, all that kinds of stuff. Those are the things that Democrats tend to be talking about. I've talked with lawmakers. I've also talked with people generally about what they view as a need to ban congressional stock trading because they view it as a real conflict of interest. I have to ask the question again, is this a conflict of interest? because you see these lawmakers in the House investing millions and millions of dollars in these types of companies that they have the power to make laws regulating.

12:54What do you think of that?

12:57Kyle Khan-Mullins: That is the multi-trillion dollar question. You know, the lawmakers who reply to my request for comment, they are all strenuously denying that their investments have anything to do with their votes and anything to do with their actions as members of Congress. Some of them, their investments are held by their spouse or they're held by independent wealth advisors or they're managed, I should say, by independent wealth advisors. And they say that gives them some distance. I talk money with my wife all the time. So that's kind of in the eye of the beholder there. And yeah, a lot of the, some of the lawmakers that we're talking about even support a congressional stock trading ban.

13:29Kyle Khan-Mullins: They would say, yeah, if there, if it came on the floor of the house, I would vote for it. But as long as it's not in place, they still own stocks. One of the lawmakers in the top 10, not in the top five representative Morrison, I think from Minnesota, she noted she's in the process of divesting, she's a freshman lawmaker, and she's noted that she's in the process of divesting all of her stocks. So she owns a data center adjacent investments, but soon maybe she won't anymore. She's still in the process there. So we've got a range of viewpoints, but basically everyone says, this has nothing to do with how I'm voting or how I'm thinking about my own personal finances.

14:08Our conversations always live on the intersection of money and politics. That's your bread and butter. That's what you report on. So I'm curious, what does this story, through the collage and perspective of all of your reporting, what does it tell you? You found out you uncovered lawmakers investing millions of dollars in this data center boom. What is this telling you?

14:27Kyle Khan-Mullins: I think there are two sort of two big lessons I drew from this reporting. The first thing is there's just a lot of potential in using AI, again somewhat ironically here, to sift through all of the vast amount of data on these disclosures. This is a little bit inside baseball, but I could not have done this reporting just by reading all the disclosures one by one by myself. This was made possible because of some automated filtering and automated transcribing of these disclosures. Some of these disclosures are handwritten. Some of these disclosures are very dense and scanned and they're hard to parse.

15:05Kyle Khan-Mullins: And so being able to sort of trade off, the AI is much better at reading just straight text. It can read it much faster than I can. I'm much better at reading handwriting. Between the two, we're able to work together a little bit and get this reporting done. And the second thing I've really pulled, this whole reporting process underscored for me how big the AI data center build out really is. So many companies are impacted by it that you wouldn't even remotely expect, at least by, you know, your first thought. If you take Caterpillar, you know, they make construction equipment. You're like, okay, yeah, they probably are, you know, they're probably doing all right.

15:39Kyle Khan-Mullins: You know, you're building data centers. You need construction equipment to do that. Caterpillar is up 300 % their shares in five years. That's crazy. And they don't make chips. They don't make software or anything like that. They are up in large part because of the data center build out. because that is how valuable and how extensive this buildout is in the U.S. economy. I appreciate you crunching the numbers here, reporting on them, and having that discussion with me. Kyle Kahn-Mullins, always a pleasure. Thanks for coming on. Always great to be here, Brittany. Thanks again.

16:26Some personality quirks are really funny.

16:28Kyle Khan-Mullins: Like, I talk to my left foot more than I talk to my right. You know what's not funny and not a personality quirk? OCD. Although the term OCD is widely recognized, it's misunderstood by most people. It doesn't mean being tidy or clean. It's having obsessive fears, thoughts, and urges. You question your character. You question your safety. That's OCD. Breaking the OCD cycle takes effective treatment. Go to NoCD.com to learn more.