A 3D-printed miniature model of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and the Greenland flag are seen in this illustration taken January 15, 2025.
Dado Ruvic | Reuters
Greenland’s icy landscape may not match its name, but its potential value certainly does.
President Donald Trump is, once again, openly pining for the U.S. to take over Greenland. His administration says it’s weighing a range of options to acquire the Danish island territory, including using the U.S. military or buying it outright.
Denmark and its European allies in NATO – the military alliance co-founded by the U.S. – have repeatedly stated that Greenland is not for sale. But Trump’s rhetoric about Greenland has flared back up in the days since the U.S. military entered Venezuela and captured that country’s leader.
The prospect of the U.S. buying Greenland is “currently being actively discussed by the president and his national security team,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters Wednesday. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said he plans to discuss Greenland with Danish officials next week.
Trump has not made an official offer, nor has he said what he believes would be a fair price for the territory.
If Denmark reversed its opposition to selling Greenland, that land likely wouldn’t come cheap. Even some conservative estimates suggest that the island could have a price tag in the hundreds of billions of dollars or higher.
Prior Greenland bids
The lowest guesses come from a direct comparison with history.
The U.S. has previously considered buying Greenland, and in 1946 made a formal offer of $100 million —nearly $1.7 billion today. That offer, which Denmark rejected, at the time amounted to 0.04% of U.S. GDP; that proportion today would equal around $1.2 billion.
But multiple analysts believe an accurate valuation would be much, much higher.
“Something in the trillions looks about right,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, a center-right think tank, in an interview.
His group sought to calculate a ballpark price for Greenland by looking both at its natural resource reserves and its potential real estate value.
The value of its known critical mineral and energy resources alone totaled more than $4.4 trillion, according to the study, which was published in January 2025 and cited data from geological surveys in the U.S., Denmark and Greenland.
That figure falls to $2.7 trillion when excluding oil and natural gas, which Greenland stopped issuing exploration licenses for in 2021, citing environmental concerns.
Not all of that value is ripe for the taking, however: Greenland’s frigid conditions and small population of about 57,000 people mean the territory has a low “resource-to-reserve conversion rate,” the study said.
For example, while Greenland boasts more than 36 million metric tons of known rare earths, its reserves total just 1.5 million tons — a conversion rate of just 4.2%. If that rate is applied across the board, AAF’s study shrinks Greenland’s value to $186 billion, though it calls that figure its “lower bound” estimate.
But Trump has recently stated that he primarily wants Greenland for its perceived national security benefits, not solely its economic potential.
“Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place,” Trump said Sunday. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security.”
The U.S. military already maintains a base in Greenland, but securing the island could give the U.S. a much stronger foothold in the Arctic.
It could also give the U.S. more access to the shipping lanes that are emerging in the planet’s northernmost latitudes as a result of climate change, experts have said.
To determine Greenland’s potential value based on its strategic location, the AAF study compared it with a similarly situated country: Iceland.
It would cost the U.S. $1.28 million per square kilometer to buy all the real estate on Iceland, for a total of $131 billion, the according to the study.
Applying that same price per square kilometer to Greenland — the world’s largest island — results in an estimated total value of nearly $2.8 trillion, AAF found.
Other pricey estimates
That number is higher than some previous analyses.
The Financial Times’ Alphaville valued Greenland at a “very conservative” $1.1 trillion in 2019, when Trump’s interest in acquiring the territory first came to light.
Iwan Morgan, emeritus professor at University College of London’s Institute of the Americas, told CNN that year that Greenland’s cost could hit the trillions, while stressing the immense political and legal complexity of any such deal.
Former New York Federal Reserve economist David Barker, however, last January valued Greenland between $12.5 billion and $77 billion. To find those numbers, Barker looked at America’s prior acquisitions of Alaska and the U.S. Virgin Islands and adjusted those prices based on GDP growth.
But Holtz-Eakin told CNBC that he believes AAF’s estimate is conservative.
“They’re pricing the economics of it. But let’s face it, this is not about economics,” he said. “What price do you put on our standing in NATO or the global order? I put a big price on that.”
— CNBC’s Justin Papp contributed to this report.
