Our new president’s obsession with buying Greenland has inspired jeers, laughs, and jokes about the cost of eggs, but more and more, the attempted procurement looks less like a joke and more like a big handout for the tech companies that backed him during the election. Multiple new reports show that some of Donald Trump’s most prominent financial benefactors have long been pursuing financial opportunities in the Arctic nation.
The Lever reports on the activities of KoBold Metals, a startup that is actively engaged in mining Greenland for raw materials that can be used to build AI products. KoBold, which is based in Berkeley, California, and uses AI to hunt for metals like cobalt, lithium, copper, and nickel, is basically the property of the tech industry’s most powerful executives. Recent White House visitors Jeff Bezos, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, have all invested in KoBold. Billionaire venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, who has helped out with Elon Musk’s DOGE and who heartily supported Trump during the election, also has a large interest in Kobold. So does Microsoft magnate Bill Gates, despite his less charitable views of Trump.
KoBold is part of something called the Disko-Nuussuaq project, a mining effort to drill for minerals along Greenland’s western coast. It has also secured a Mineral Exploration License for Disko Island—which is located off Greenland’s west coast—for the years 2024-30.
The New York Times has also reported on the business interests of a firm called Critical Metals, which has plans to mine Greenland starting in the year 2026. Cantor Fitzgerald, a powerful financial firm owned by Trump’s current nominee for U.S. Commerce Secretary, Wall Street billionaire Howard Lutnick, has a stake in Critical Metals. Though Lutnick plans to step down from Cantor Fitzgerald and sell off his stake if he is confirmed, the Times has noted that Lutnick could stand to influence tariff and trade policy relative to Greenland in his new position as Commerce Secretary.
As such, the Arctic territory’s acquisition may come down to mining lithium to create car batteries and extracting precious metals to build America’s data centers.
The AI industry obviously has major plans to scale up its operations in the coming years and, to do that, it’s going to need easy access to two things: raw materials and energy. Last week, the Trump administration announced project “Stargate,” a $500 billion effort to build data centers across the U.S. with money from OpenAI, NVIDIA, Microsoft, Oracle, and other big-name players in the AI industry. The project seeks to create unparalleled “AI infrastructure” to make America competitive with China in the race to build increasingly advanced forms of AI.
Gizmodo reached out to KoBold and Critical Metals for comment.
Another factor to keep in mind is the growing influence of the “Network State” movement, a bizarre side-project of Silicon Valley’s billionaire class that seeks to create a diaspora of privately-funded, crypto-powered cities in countries all over the globe. Companies associated with the Network State—like the crypto startup Praxis—have announced their desire to use Greenland as a neo-colonial testing ground for their urban development experiments.
Despite what Donald Trump Jr. has said, Greenland, itself, has expressed little interest in being owned by America. A recent poll found that only 6 percent of the nation’s residents wanted to join the U.S. Denmark, meanwhile, has been even more vociferously hostile to the idea. The Scandinavian country has signaled a willingness to engage in a trade war with Trump if that’s what it comes to.
The general consensus is that the rush to invest in Greenland may be tied to the broader geopolitical struggle between the U.S. and China. AI is broadly viewed as the most important innovation of our era, which is why both countries are fighting for technological supremacy.
The Lever points to a recent comment from Michael Waltz, Trump’s incoming national security adviser: “This is about critical minerals, this is about natural resources,” Waltz recently told Fox News, of the Greenland acquisition. It couldn’t be any clearer than that.