Alaska Republican US Rep. Nick Begich III may be the state’s head data center cheerleader, but Republican US Sen. Dan Sullivan hasn’t been far behind.
For years, Sullivan has echoed conservative Alaska lawmakers’ pitch that the state is the ideal location for a massive build-out of data centers needed to fuel the ongoing development of artificial intelligence software. And it just so happens that the proliferation of data centers is good business for the Sullivan family chemical company.
At his annual address to the Alaska Legislature this year, he took credit for the US Air Force’s moves to deploy data centers on military land throughout the state.
“The Air Force, at my strong urging, put out a request for information on doing this in Alaska for data centers. This is a big idea. We have a handout on this one, too,” he said. “I’ve been pitching this to everybody in the country who will listen.”
Some of the people Sullivan has pitched include industry executives like OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Microsoft vice chair and president Brad Smith, who Sullivan regaled with the advantages of Alaska at a 2025 hearing on AI.
“We want you guys to all come up to Alaska with your data centers. We’ve got a lot of cold weather, we got gas, we got land, we got water, we got it all,” Sullivan said. “Come on up.”
“Very compelling,” Altman replied.
Sullivan has pitched data centers as an economic boom for Alaska that will create thousands of jobs and new sources of revenue for the state.
“Imagine the possibilities,” he said at his legislative address. “Imagine the private sector opportunities that could start here—manufacturing, thousands of good-paying jobs, data centers, a steady source of income for many years to fill our state’s coffers.
Studies, however, suggest that the economic benefit from data centers is more concentrated than Sullivan suggested because they create fewer jobs than their backers claim and local workers see little in terms of higher wages.
Instead, many communities have complained that data centers have led to a marked decline in the quality of life with noise and water pollution, and Alaskans living near Air Force land being developed for data centers at Sullivan’s request are worried it could upend their lives.
“People say living close to them, it’s like having a vacuum cleaner on 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I can’t imagine anyone in Salcha is going to want to listen to a vacuum cleaner,” Sarah Hollister told KTUU about plans to lease out land near Eielson Air Force Base to private data centers.
While people living near data centers haven’t been thrilled by their impact, the economic boom has been a major driver for the stock market and benefited companies with any connection to the AI and data center industries, like RPM International, the multi-billion-dollar chemical company Sullivan’s family owns.
RPM is best known for owning Rust-Oleum spray paint, but it also owns several other companies that produce specialized paints and coatings used in big data center installations. At one earnings call, Sullivan’s older brother, Frank Sullivan, said one business “does a really nice chunk of business in data centers” and in another said that data centers are poised to be “an area of growth for the coming years.”
Sullivan holds about $5 million in RPM stock, a major driver in the fact that his personal wealth has tripled while in office.
The headlong rush to deploy data centers may be good business for some, but the haste has been alarming for those who’ll be burdened by having a noisy and polluting data center in their backyard.
“We want to make sure that our land is passed down to the next generation,” Hollister said of the plans of building data centers in her community. “If we build giant data centers that destroy the air and destroy the water, we’re not going to be able to do that. Our land will not be there for the next generation, and so I just want to take a step back, slow down, and make sure that we’re doing the right thing with this, that these… data centers are not going to harm our community.”
While Sullivan and Begich have been on the forefront of bringing data centers to Alaska, their main opponents, Democrat Mary Peltola and Independent candidate Bill Hill, have called for stricter regulations on data centers, including more public input, firm protections against impacts on energy bills, and stronger regulation of AI.
Matt Acuña Buxton is a long-time political reporter who has written for the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner and The Midnight Sun political blog. He also authors the newsletter on the Alaska Legislature, The Alaska Memo, and can frequently be found live-tweeting public meetings on Bluesky.
