President Trump wants Greenland. How much does it cost to purchase?

Greenland’s icy landscape may not match its name, but its potential value certainly does.

President Donald Trump has openly aspired for the United States to occupy Greenland again. The administration said it was considering a range of options to acquire Denmark’s island territories, including the use of the U.S. military and an outright takeover.

Denmark and its European allies in NATO, the military alliance co-founded by the United States, have repeatedly said Greenland is not for sale. But President Trump’s rhetoric regarding Greenland has flared up again since the U.S. military invaded Venezuela and detained the country’s leader.

The possibility of a U.S. purchase of Greenland is “currently being actively discussed by the president and his national security team,” White House press secretary Caroline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he plans to discuss Greenland with Danish officials next week.

President Trump has not made a formal offer or said what he believes is a fair price for the territory.

Even if Denmark withdraws its opposition to selling Greenland, the land is unlikely to be available cheaply. Conservative estimates suggest the island’s value could be in the hundreds of billions of dollars or more.

The lowest guess comes from direct comparison with history.

The United States had previously considered purchasing Greenland, making a formal offer of $100 million (nearly $1.7 billion today) in 1946. This proposal, rejected by Denmark, was equivalent to 0.04% of US GDP at the time. That percentage is equivalent to about $1.2 billion today.

However, several analysts believe the exact valuation is likely to be much higher.

“It looks like something about trillions of dollars is about right,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the center-right think tank American Action Forum, said in an interview.

His group attempted to calculate an approximate value for Greenland by considering both natural resource reserves and potential real estate values.

The total value of known significant mineral and energy resources alone is more than $4.4 trillion, according to a study released in January 2025 that cited data from geological surveys in the United States, Denmark, and Greenland.

That number drops to $2.7 trillion if you exclude oil and gas, for which Greenland stopped issuing exploration licenses in 2021, citing environmental concerns.

But not all of that value is ripe for exploitation. Greenland’s frigid conditions and small population of around 57,000 mean the region’s “resource-to-reserve conversion rate” is low, the study said.

For example, Greenland has more than 36 million tonnes of known rare earths, but its reserves total only 1.5 million tonnes, with an exchange rate of just 4.2%. Applying this rate across the board would reduce Greenland’s value to $186 billion, according to the AAF study, which the agency calls a “lower bound” estimate.

But President Trump recently said he wants Greenland primarily because of its economic potential as well as its perceived national security interests.

“Greenland is now covered in Russian and Chinese ships everywhere,” President Trump said on Sunday. “We need Greenland from a national security perspective.”

The US military already maintains a base in Greenland, but securing the island could give the US a stronger foothold in the Arctic.

Climate change could also give the United States greater access to emerging sea lanes in the Earth’s northernmost latitudes, experts say.

To determine Greenland’s potential value based on its strategic location, the AAF study compared Greenland to a similarly located country, Iceland.

According to the study, it would cost $1.28 million per square kilometer to buy all of Iceland’s real estate, for a total cost of $131 billion.

If the same price per square kilometer were applied to Greenland, the world’s largest island, the total estimated value would be approximately $2.8 trillion, the AAF found.

This number is higher than some previous analyses.

The Financial Times’ Alphaville valued Greenland at a “very modest” $1.1 trillion in 2019, when Trump’s interest in acquiring the territory first became clear.

Ivan Morgan, professor emeritus at the Institute of American Studies at the University of London, told CNN in the same year that the cost for Greenland could reach trillions of dollars, stressing that such an agreement would be extremely complex politically and legally.

But former New York Fed economist David Barker last January valued Greenland at between $12.5 billion and $77 billion. To find these numbers, Barker looked at America’s previous acquisitions of Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands and adjusted their prices based on GDP growth.

But Holtz-Eakin told CNBC she believes the AAF’s estimates are conservative.

“They set their prices based on economics, but to be honest, this is not a question of economics,” he said. “What price will we pay for NATO and our place in the world order? I’ll pay a high price for it.”

—CNBC’s Justin Papp contributed to this report.