The Trump administration has sought to open the door to the AI industry by supporting America’s tech giants as they look to scale their AI businesses and incorporate artificial intelligence into every aspect of American life. This industrial boom has come with a gold rush for the data center industry – which provides cloud services that support many generative AI applications and platforms. Data centers are being built across the country and as the government supports the effort, the son of Trump’s Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is said to be making money from it.
The news comes from a recent article published by the New York Times, which discussed the business relationship between 29-year-old Kyle Lutnick and 27-year-old Brandon Lutnick and AI business, Fermi America. In July, Kyle Lutnick visited a property in Texas where Fermi intended to build a new data center, as the newspaper noted. There he met Fermi’s co-founder and CEO, billionaire Toby Neugebauer. Both of Lutnick’s sons currently help run Cantor Fitzgerald, the financial services firm that their father ran for many years (he resigned from his role at the company to become Trump’s Commerce Secretary). The Times notes that Cantor Fitzgerald is “helping raise capital” for Fermi’s new data center and, in the process, “collecting millions in fees.”
Not long ago, the elder Lutnick had his photo taken with Neuberger as part of an event organized to celebrate a strategic partnership between Fermi and a Japanese company called Doosan Enerbility, described as “the largest global supplier of nuclear power plant components for the last 40 years.” The partnership, formalized through a memorandum of understanding, “will advance broad collaboration across multiple projects and technology platforms in support of Fermi’s US long-term nuclear development strategy,” a press release said.
Howard Lutnick’s role in the project in which his sons are financially involved is explained by the newspaper as follows:
According to an investigation by The New York Times, this sequence of events – a son making money on a project his father is promoting as a federal official – has played out repeatedly since President Trump appointed Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce Department. In that role, Mr. Lutnick has twisted the arms of American allies, demanding policy favors in exchange for investment in American industrial projects. At times, these tactics have created opportunities for his family clients to gain access to badly needed foreign capital, the Times found.
The Times’ also notes that “the family’s companies operate in a wide range of industries, from cryptocurrency to data centers, which overlap with Mr. Lutnick’s work in government.” These activities have raised concerns “among high-level staff members at the Commerce Department,” the Times writes, citing current and former officials. Gizmodo contacted the Trump administration, Fermi America, and Cantor Fitzgerald LP for comment.
A White House spokesperson told the Times: “The fact of the matter is that the only special interest guiding the decisions of Secretary Lutnick and the rest of the Trump administration is the best interest of the American people.”
Trump’s support for the AI industry has been significant and consistent. In January, the White House announced the Stargate project, designed to support the creation of “AI infrastructure” and data centers across the US. In July, the Trump administration also passed an executive order designed to expedite federal permitting for data center construction. The government has also sought to modernize regulations and loosen red tape for the nuclear industry, which the AI business sees as a vital resource in the race to master AI’s enormous energy footprint. In recent days, Trump also drafted an order that would allow the federal government to take action against states that try to impose their own AI rules.