Gov. Dunleavy working with DigitalBridge to build data centers in Alaska
- The Alaska Current
- Jan 14
- 9 min read
Controversial CBR investment may be part of Dunleavy’s gas pipeline plan and Trump’s Stargate AI project
This story was originally published by The Alaska Current and is republished here with their permission.
By Lauren Windsor
The Alaska Current
Alaska’s former revenue commissioner and current gubernatorial candidate, Adam Crum, is under fire from lawmakers for committing up to $75 million of the state’s primary rainy day fund to a risky and opaque private equity venture – during a state fiscal crisis, and on his way out the door. But much more scrutiny should be on the governor.
Gov. Dunleavy launched a pricey investigation into Crum’s investment of Constitutional Budget Reserve (CBR) funds in DigitalBridge, a tech infrastructure investment firm connected to major Trump allies and the president’s Stargate AI project. But the governor has largely declined to answer questions on his own involvement, which now appears to be extensive and to include one of his top priorities, the AK LNG Project.
Considered “one of the most ambitious gas infrastructure projects ever attempted globally,” the AK LNG pipeline would cross the state north to south over 800 miles of Arctic and sub-Arctic terrain. Its construction has long stagnated from the high build costs and low in-state energy demand.
Citing the need for “an anchor tenant,” Dunleavy has been wooing energy-intensive data centers to the state to increase energy demand to levels justifying the massive pipeline investment. In the fall of 2024, he sent pitch letters to several major tech CEOs, and toured possible development sites with executives from Switch, a major data center builder. Previously unreported with regard to the CBR deal with DigitalBridge is that the firm is the majority owner of Switch.
Also previously unreported, Switch executives made another scouting trip to Alaska in the spring of 2025 and hosted Dunleavy at their headquarters in Las Vegas, according to DigitalBridge’s managing director, Severin White, in remarks to an energy conference hosted by Dunleavy last summer. His panel focused on the investment opportunities between data centers and energy projects, specifically naming the Alaska LNG pipeline and reinforcing Dunleavy’s and Trump’s plans. White lauded the governor and his team, touting their partnership in building AI infrastructure together in the state.
Alaska’s relationship with DigitalBridge extends to other previously unreported state investment funds beyond the CBR, pre-dates Crum’s tenure, and spans Dunleavy’s – but neither man has mentioned this history in connection with the CBR controversy. This has all unfolded against the backdrop of the state legislature aggressively pursuing greater fiscal accountability from the Dunleavy administration, raising questions about whether the DigitalBridge deal was signed before a law mandating greater transparency could take effect.
‘A complete and utter lie‘
DigitalBridge Group is the product of a 2021 rebranding and 2019 merger with Colony Capital, an investment firm founded by Tom Barrack, the current ambassador to Turkey and a close friend of Donald Trump going back decades. The company utilizes a diversified investment strategy – private equity, private income, venture capital, and stock – to build AI infrastructure like data centers, considered by many in the finance industry to be in a speculative bubble that could cause the next big market crash.
Alaska’s reserve cash is invested in a private equity fund, which typically locks up investor money for five to 15 years, making the asset class ill-suited to CBR investing guidelines requiring safety and liquidity. The inherent risk of private equity offers the possibility of higher returns, which other Alaskan public fund managers have pursued with some blowback. The CBR did have a subaccount that allowed for higher yield investments, but the legislature “emptied it in 2015 to reduce risk.”
Announced late last month, Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank is in the process of acquiring DigitalBridge to take it private. Subsequently, the CBR deal may pose greater risk for Alaska, given the less stringent reporting requirements on private companies by the Securities and Exchange Commission. SoftBank is a major partner in Donald Trump’s $500 billion Stargate project, a data center initiative that he announced on his second day in office as “the largest AI infrastructure project in history.”
It’s normal for due diligence, negotiations, and marketing prep ahead of public acquisition announcements to take upwards of six months, so it’s possible that Crum and Dunleavy knew of DigitalBridge’s involvement with SoftBank at the time Crum signed the CBR deal in late July of last year. Trump’s personal imprimatur of SoftBank would certainly reduce the appearance of risk for any DigitalBridge deals, which would bring the added political benefit of helping the president score big policy wins. (Crum is seeking Trump’s endorsement for governor. It is widely speculated that Dunleavy will run for Murkowski’s U.S. Senate seat.)
Then-Revenue Commissioner Crum signed the long-term, private equity contract on July 28, three days after Gov. Dunleavy had announced Crum’s impending departure. Other officials in the Department of Revenue (DOR) claim to have learned of the contract when the firm contacted them demanding tens of millions of dollars for a capital call. The legislature was notified on Sept. 30, and news broke publicly the next day.
In an October interview with Alaska Public Media, Crum claimed that the DigitalBridge deal had been in the works for more than a year; that it was approved by Dunleavy’s office and the Department of Law (DOL); and that he had “delayed his planned resignation to complete it.” According to the Anchorage Daily News, Crum said the governor himself had known about the deal for months, and that “the whole claim that no one knew this was coming is a complete and utter lie.”
Dunleavy has largely stonewalled in response, although he did confirm that the DOL had advised Crum. The governor’s public calendar reportedly shows that he attended a meeting with DigitalBridge executives before the commitment was finalized, and another with Crum and DigitalBridge on Nov. 18, 2024, but his office has declined to confirm his attendance at either meeting. Dunleavy himself has declined to elaborate on his own participation in the deal.
Neither Dunleavy nor Crum have responded to multiple requests for comment for this story.
A ‘non-routine’ deal
The two men are, or at least were, Republican allies. After winning the 2018 gubernatorial race, Dunleavy appointed Crum, an industrial jobs training executive and early donor to his campaign – who was admittedly not a “health care policy guy” – to lead the Alaska Department of Health. In Nov. 2022, he promoted Crum, despite his scant investing credentials, to head the powerful Department of Revenue, which oversees a purported $138 billion in state assets and oil company tax revenues critical to state government operations.
Multiple Alaskan politicos told me that Crum was widely viewed as the governor’s lackey in cultivating a culture of corruption at the DOR. The Dunleavy administration has not ever provided the information necessary for a full, mandatory financial audit – the last occurred in 2018. This year, Dunleavy’s obstructionism culminated in the passage of SB 183, a law compelling greater fiscal transparency from the DOR, which legislators worry has been hiding sweetheart deals with oil companies to let them off the hook for what could be hundreds of millions of dollars in unpaid taxes. All of this has coincided with deepening state deficits driven by declines in oil revenues and resulting in major cuts to government services, particularly the public school system. Once-unthinkable doomsday budget scenarios have become increasingly likely.
Dunleavy vetoed SB 183 in June, but the legislature overrode him in a rare bipartisan show of force in early August. The timeline of the DigitalBridge deal dovetails with this veto override, raising questions about whether Dunleavy and Crum rushed to close the deal early to avoid the greater scrutiny the legislature would enforce upon the DOR.
On a Sept. 30 phone call, Dunleavy disclosed the DigitalBridge deal to Republican Senate President Gary Stevens and Independent Speaker of the House Bryce Edgmon, who said the governor appeared to be unaware of Crum’s actions. Dunleavy promised them an “independent, third-party review” into whether Crum followed the CBR’s investing guidelines, but that review might not be very independent: Attorney General Stephen Cox signed a contract with a pricey, out-of-state law firm – his former employer, Wilmer Hale. Stevens and Edgmon initiated their own review from the legislative auditor, who has since characterized the deal as “non-routine.”
DigitalBridge is the CBR’s first foray into private equity, but the firm is no stranger to other Alaska state investment vehicles, although for different products. As early as 2021 – prior to Crum’s tenure as revenue commissioner – the company took in $75 million for private income infrastructure investment from the Alaska Permanent Fund Corporation (APFC), which also held stock in Colony Capital as early as 2018. A sovereign wealth fund that has become the third rail of Alaskan politics, the APFC collects oil revenues, invests them, and then pays all residents an annual dividend check, which has declined in recent years as politicians tap the APFC to cover state operating expenses.
In 2022, DigitalBridge was listed as an external money manager for real estate assets for the Alaska Teachers’ Retirement System (ATRS). For 2023, Equable ranked the pension fund 29th in the country for funded liabilities, below the national average funded ratio of 78.1%. It is unclear if this relationship is ongoing. Precisely when Alaska began investing in DigitalBridge and Colony Capital is also unclear, but the deals predate former Crum’s tenure and span most of Governor Dunleavy’s.
These earlier investments with DigitalBridge by different state entities are previously unreported in connection with this scandal, and are important to note, because as revenue commissioner, Crum was a trustee for several state investment vehicles, including the APFC and ATRS. If multiple state entities hold investments in the same firm, there could be increased risk if there are not proper diversification measures in place.
Additionally, neither Crum nor Dunleavy appeared to recognize DigitalBridge as an investment fund manager with a long history of business partnership with Alaska. That both of these public executives could be oblivious to this history seems implausible, given the aggressive courting that investing firms undertake in pitching their financial wares.
‘The Intersection of Data and Energy Demand’
According to Crum, DigitalBridge is “interested in Alaska for a lot of things” and has made many trips to the state. Last June, the managing director and head of investor relations for DigitalBridge, Severin White, spoke about the investment opportunity at the intersection of AI and energy at one of the governor’s signature projects, the Alaska Sustainable Energy Conference (ASEC), and said that he was “thrilled to be engaged with the great State of Alaska on it.”
Mapping out the tech infrastructure landscape and investment opportunities in the state, White noted that DigitalBridge owns the largest cell tower portfolio there, and discussed the siting requirements of their data centers. He shared that a team from Switch, their data center operation, had visited a couple months earlier to scout locations, and that Gov. Dunleavy had “been kind enough” to travel to Switch’s headquarters, which is in Las Vegas.
It’s not clear if the CBR is involved with DigitalBridge’s cell tower or data center assets, but Crum said that his $50 million commitment was “not for in-state investment.” This distinction matters because the state has come under fire for in-state investments that failed. Key problems with investing in-state include potential self-dealing and losing focus from the “mission to maximize returns regardless of geography.”
In late August, after the DigitalBridge deal was signed and Crum departed as revenue commissioner, both White and Dunleavy appeared at the North Slope Borough Oil and Gas Forum in Anchorage. White is not listed in the agenda, but according to an NSB report released last month, he participated in a panel entitled “Power Generation: The Arctic Transmission Corridor” with Crum’s former deputy at the Dept. of Revenue, Fadil Limani, who is now an NSB finance official. White’s attendance at the forum has not been previously reported.
It is unclear what interaction Dunleavy and White had at either event, apart from White’s praise of the governor at ASEC. White is not listed in the Alaska lobbyist portal, although he appears to meet the threshold for reporting. Neither Dunleavy nor White have responded to multiple requests for comment.
Why the obfuscation if everything is above board?
Dunleavy announced Crum’s resignation in late July. Crum committed the CBR money to DigitalBridge days later, and announced his gubernatorial bid to replace his boss in mid-August. Jeff Landfield, the publisher of The Alaska Landmine, told me that Crum’s ambitions were well known in political circles more than a year ago, and that Crum would have left DOR in the summer of 2025 regardless of the legislature’s veto override mandating greater transparency in his department.
Perhaps correlation is not causation here, but it is still entirely plausible that the looming threat of increased scrutiny from the legislature accelerated the signing of the DigitalBridge deal and Crum’s departure.
Dunleavy, who took office in 2018 and is now termed out, will leave the governor’s office at the end of 2026. Last fall, “the worst kept secret” in the state capitol was that he was under consideration for a cabinet post in the Trump administration. According to multiple sources in Anchorage, rumors circulated that his appointment was tanked by energy industry executives who thought he was not aggressive enough in catering to their needs. Expected to run against Lisa Murkowski for the US Senate in 2028, Dunleavy will need those executives’ support, and likely Trump’s, to take her out – she overcame the odds to win as a write-in ballot candidate in 2010, defeating Tea Party challenger Joe Miller. Her write-in Senate victory was the first since Strom Thurmond in 1954.
As for Crum, he faces a crowded gubernatorial field: 14 candidates have declared, others are under speculation. He traveled to the White House last October and “has made it a priority” to secure Trump’s support.
• Lauren Windsor is the executive producer of The Undercurrent, an independent investigative news webshow, sponsored by American Family Voices, a progressive nonprofit she leads. Her reporting to expose Jan. 6 deniers formed the basis for "Gonzo for Democracy,” a documentary she wrote, directed, and produced. Specializing in communications strategy, Lauren is a partner in Democracy Partners and Mike Lux Media. She has appeared on ABC, CNN, MSNBC, and Newsnation. Her work has additionally been featured on CBS, NBC, The New York Times, Politico, Rolling Stone, The Washington Post, among others.
