- A data center used by the Trump Media & Technology Group is owned by an investment company belonging to the wealthy Bradley family from Missouri, according to SEC filings.
The Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) houses some of its servers in a data center in Omaha, Nebraska, owned by the family office of a longtime Midwestern media mogul.
The server company, “1623 Farnam Road,” is fully owned by the BERKS Group, the private-investment company of the Bradley family, according to public documents sourced from the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Nebraska Secretary of State’s office, and the Missouri Secretary of State’s office. The BERKS Group is an investment company, run essentially like a family office, which the Bradley family set up after they sold the majority of the assets from the News-Press & Gazette Company (NPG), the longtime media company that owns newspapers, televisions channels, and radio stations across the country.
The existence of the server might sound like an unsurprising technicality, given that TMTG is an online media company. But TMTG often keeps these relationships close to its chest. It has redacted mention of 1623 Farnam in the majority of its SEC filings. Fortune found mention of the 1623 Farnam facility in a footnote of a contract between TMTG and one of its vendors, WorldConnect Technologies. In that agreement, WorldConnect was due 2.5 million shares of TMTG stock at the opening of the first data center at 1623 Farnam’s data center in Omaha.
The relationship adds detail to the business partners and structure of TMTG, which comprises a major portion of President Donald Trump’s personal net worth.
1623 Farnam declined to comment on the record for this story. TMTG did not respond to a request for comment.
- Fortune’s series on Trump Media & Technology Group
- The company building Trump Media’s tech has historic links to Iran, Russia, and China
- Trump’s $8 billion media company creates a complex set of potential conflicts for the incoming president
- Trump Media is quietly storing at least one of its data centers in a facility owned by a longtime Republican donor and media mogul
- Trump Media lockup deadline leaves Trump with a choice: trigger a fire sale or hold a meme stock
President Trump’s net worth is wrapped up in TMTG
Trump is TMTG’s largest shareholder, controlling 53% of the company. Despite holding no formal role in TMTG, its success as a business is nonetheless directly linked to his own net worth. Based on TMTG’s current stock price, Trump’s roughly 114 million shares are worth about $3.6 billion. In December, Trump placed his shares in a revocable trust controlled by his son and current TMTG board member Donald Trump Jr.
While the president may have made the majority of his fortune as a real estate developer and TV personality, in reality he is now a technology mogul. In his past life, his business relationships may have been with companies that poured cement or fitted I-beams for skyscrapers. Now they are with technology vendors that develop the content delivery networks that power streaming content or with data center providers like 1623 Farnam.
These companies are not household names, nor do they provide services that ordinary consumers of social media apps or streaming services consider as they use them in their daily lives. Yet they are crucial to the operations of any tech company, including TMTG. Given Trump’s financial stake in TMTG and his current role as President of the United States they present new possible conflicts of interest that are unique to the 21st century.
1623 Farnam provides TMTG access to the networking capabilities that allow it to connect to the internet. In the telecommunications industry companies such as 1623 Farnam are known as “carrier hotels,” which are physical locations that serve as meeting points for the many networks that make up the internet.
“The internet is not a single network,” said University of Massachusetts computer science professor Ramesh Sitamaran. “It is a collection of a large number of independent networks. For [information] to be sent from one place on the internet to another, it has to go through a number of independent networks. So, you need places where networks can physically ‘meet’ each other to exchange [information]. Carrier hotels facilitate that meeting.”
Carrier hotels were early precursors to cloud computing, but still remain critical pieces of technology infrastructure that are crucial to how the internet operates. Because they connect many different networks in a single location they are often found in downtown areas of big cities, meaning that there are relatively few of them, which in turn has made them valuable investment opportunities.
“One could argue this is as important as power, sewer and water,” Brian Bradley, an owner in the BERKS Group and the current president of NPG, said in 2018 when it acquired 1623 Farnam.
A family affair
The Bradleys are a wealthy family from St. Joseph, Missouri, whose patriarch, Henry Bradley, made a fortune in the news business after buying up dozens of regional newspapers in the Midwest and later local television and radio stations under NPG. In 2011, the family sold the majority of its broadcast assets to SuddenLink Communications, a former subsidiary of Altice, for a reported $350 million.
Since then, the Bradleys have mostly focused on running their the BERKS Group, which invests in manufacturing, edtech, and technology infrastructure, according to its website. Six members of the Bradley family currently serve in the BERKS Group’s leadership as both board members and executives, according to its website.
The BERKS Group bought 1623 Farnam in 2018 for an undisclosed price. At the time, the company was known as Nebraska Data Center. The BERKS Group pledged to invest $30 million over five years in 1623 Farnam when it purchased the company.
TMTG's ‘uncancelable’ media network
As TMTG continues to build up its technology stack, it has developed commercial relationships with little-known business-to-business companies, such as 1623 Farnam. Despite being unfamiliar to most, these companies now play a significant role in the operations of TMTG.
For the better part of a year, TMTG has been engaged in a process to build its own proprietary technology infrastructure to power both its X-like Truth Social and a nascent video streaming platform Truth+. Earlier this week TMTG also announced it would develop a fintech platform called Truth.Fi. TMTG regularly touts this system in SEC filings as integral to its mission to become “uncancelable” by Big Tech. The data center at 1623 Farnam was the first location to house the network for TMTG’s burgeoning tech holdings.
In November 2024, TMTG announced all of its data centers were fully operational. The contract with WorldConnect grants it further stock incentives for five total data centers. It was not clear where those additional data centers are located or whether they were all operational.
TMTG announced its first data center was online in August 2024, around the time it began rolling out its streaming service. Currently, TMTG has a standalone streaming platform called Truth+, which is available on iOS, Android, and Amazon Fire TV, as well as live content within its Truth Social app. These capabilities are housed on a proprietary content delivery network developed by Perception Group, which was introduced to TMTG by WorldConnect Technologies, according to previous reporting from Fortune, an obscure company with no website, run by associates of James E. Davison, a Louisiana businessman and major Republican donor.
Family political donations
The Bradley family also has a history of making personal donations to Republican candidates over the years, according to data from the Federal Election Commission and Open Secrets. From 2014 to 2024, the six family members employed at the BERKS Group gave at least $76,000 to various Republican candidates in total. None of the Bradley family members have donated directly to any of President Donald Trump’s three presidential campaigns, according to the records reviewed by Fortune.
Two family members, Rall Bradley and Eric Bradley, also donate regularly to Democratic candidates, including in the most recent election cycle, according to data from Open Secrets. The family also donates to the political arm of the broadcast industry’s D.C. lobbying group, the National Association of Broadcasters, which backs both Republican and Democratic candidates.
