Technology Elites and the Takeover of US Foreign Policy towards Greenland

Technology elites in the US have had long-standing ambitions associated with Greenland, with their economic interests surrounding the island’s vast resources garnering the most widespread attention. Greenland has about 12% of the world’s rare earth reserves, which are necessary for everything from smartphones, Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, data centres, renewable energy technology, electric vehicle batteries, semiconductors and more. Overall, 25 of 34 minerals considered “critical raw materials” by the European Commission are found in Greenland, including graphite and titanium. Interestingly, these minerals were largely unreachable due to the massive ice sheet which covered 80% of Greenland and have only recently been considered a viable resource due to the effects of climate change.

As a result, technology elites have become increasingly involved in extractive practices through which they aim to harness Greenland’s resources. KoBold Metals, a company which uses AI systems to find copper, cobalt and nickel mines along Greenland’s coastlines, has been largely funded by US technology elites. These funders include Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Similarly, Andreessen and former PayPal CEO Peter Thiel have funded Praxis Nation, a project which has been actively attempting to purchase and govern Greenland. Interestingly, this aspiration to extract Greenland’s resources had been present under the Biden administration as well, with both KoBold and Praxis having lobbied for the use of climate funds for critical mineral mining. It was really under the current Trump administration, however, that the more expansionist ideologies of the technology elite surrounding Greenland were elevated and adopted as the official state policy.

Besides the economic interests of the technology elite in the acquisition of Greenland, their political and ideological motivations have received comparatively less attention. For many prominent members of the US technology elite, Greenland has been designated as the ideal territory from which to build the ‘network-state’, which is defined as a ‘global political project allowing venture capitalists to acquire land, build infrastructure, establish sovereignty and operate as a distributed world power’. Through the acquisition of Greenland, the technology elite aim to establish a ‘new nation’, which operates outside the confines of the international nation-state model, is free from the global regulatory framework, and ultimately has its own sovereignty. Prominent technology elites such as Theil, Musk, Andreessen and others are all proponents of this vision.

The network-state concept is not a conspiracy theory; the technology elite have already actively begun to implement it. In 2024, Praxis founder Dryden Brown had attempted to buy Greenland from Denmark, a move which was outright refused by the Danish government. Brown’s subsequent proposal was to build a new city on Greenland’s uninhabited land – a project he described as a “prototype of Terminus”, the name Musk had selected for his first city on Mars. When these private efforts to acquire Greenland from Denmark failed, technology elites turned to the US government, with the Trump administration increasingly emphasising the need for the US to acquire Greenland.