Kyle Lutnick, the 29-year-old scion of his family’s real estate business, traveled in July to Amarillo, Texas, to walk a dusty tract of land with the head of an artificial intelligence start-up called Fermi America.

He was touring the site of a future data center with Toby Neugebauer, a billionaire who is building one of the behemoth facilities that will power the next generation of A.I. Mr. Lutnick’s company was helping raise capital for the center, banking millions in fees in the process.

“Polite young man,” Mr. Neugebauer said in an interview.

A month later, Kyle’s father, Howard Lutnick, was photographed with Mr. Neugebauer at an event near the White House that celebrated Fermi’s partnership with a South Korean company on the same data center project.

This sequence of events — a son making money on a project his father is boosting as a federal official — has come up repeatedly since President Trump tapped Howard Lutnick to head the Commerce Department, according to an investigation by The New York Times.

In that role, Mr. Lutnick has twisted the arms of American allies, dangling policy favors in exchange for investments in U.S. industrial projects. At times, these tactics have created opportunities for his family’s clients to gain access to much-needed foreign capital, The Times found.

Mr. Lutnick, for example, demanded that the South Korean government invest billions of dollars in U.S. industry to reduce tariffs. Mr. Neugebauer is vying for a share of those investment dollars to build the data center that Mr. Lutnick’s family is also helping to finance.

The job of commerce secretary has always been to promote American industry through deal-making at home and abroad, and the position has traditionally been populated with titans of industry who were expected to bring a business sensibility to meetings filled with career government workers.

But never in modern U.S. history has the office intersected so broadly and deeply with the financial interests of the commerce secretary’s own family, according to interviews with ethics lawyers and historians.

Since February, Kyle Lutnick and his younger brother Brandon, 27, have helped run a network of companies under the corporate umbrella of Cantor Fitzgerald L.P. The companies, led by their father until this year, include the Wall Street investment firm Cantor, the securities brokerage BGC Group and the real estate company Newmark Group.

Brandon is the chairman of Cantor Fitzgerald L.P., and Kyle is the executive vice chairman. The sons and their two younger siblings have a controlling ownership stake in all three companies in the network.

The family’s companies operate in a wide range of industries, from cryptocurrencies to data centers, that overlap with Mr. Lutnick’s work in government, raising concerns even among high-level staff members in the Commerce Department, according to five current and former officials and others familiar with the matter.

It is a blurring of lines that has become a defining characteristic of Mr. Trump’s second term, where top officials and their family members have retained major stakes in industries the government oversees. For months, the president’s two older sons and the sons of his Middle East adviser, Steve Witkoff, have traveled the world pursuing deals that have generated hundreds of millions in profits, at least on paper.

As for Mr. Lutnick, The Times did not find evidence that he had intervened in policy discussions with the intention of driving business to his family. But as he promoted data center construction, business has boomed at the Lutnick companies.

Newmark recently announced that it had completed more than $25 billion of data center deals in the past 12 months, taking a small cut in fees on each transaction. “We are having our best year ever,” Brandon Lutnick said in October at a conference in Switzerland.

The White House and the Commerce Department said in statements that Mr. Lutnick had fulfilled his ethics requirements and took them seriously.

“The fact of the matter is that the only special interest guiding Secretary Lutnick and the rest of the Trump administration’s decision-making is the best interest of the American people,” said Kush Desai, a White House spokesman.

Representatives for Cantor and Newmark said the firms had business expertise and relationships that long predated Mr. Lutnick’s role in the administration.

Newmark’s chief executive, Barry Gosin, said in a statement that the company was the industry leader in raising capital and leasing for data centers.

“Newmark’s data center advisory work is independent of governmental and other private activities,” Mr. Gosin said. “Our success in this sector reflects the optimal outcomes we deliver for our clients.”



Family Affair: Commerce Secretary’s Sons Cash In on A.I. Frenzy