Utilities are wielding eminent domain to acquire hundreds of parcels for transmission lines that will primarily serve private data centers, and courts are largely letting them do it.
Here’s a sentence that would have sounded dystopian five years ago: your local power company can take your land so that an AI data center gets electricity. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s happening right now across multiple US states.
Utilities are increasingly using eminent domain, the government’s power to seize private property for “public use,” to acquire land for high-voltage transmission lines. The catch is that these lines are primarily built to feed private AI data centers, not neighborhood grids.
What’s actually happening on the ground #
Georgia Power is working to acquire over 300 parcels of land for a 35-mile transmission line called the Ashley-Park Wansley project. That sounds like standard utility infrastructure until you learn that roughly 70-80% of the power flowing through those lines is earmarked for data center use.
Private homes sit on some of those parcels. Homeowners who refuse to sell could face eminent domain proceedings, which is a polite way of saying the state forces the sale whether you agree or not. Georgia Power says it treats eminent domain as a last resort, claiming less than 1% of its land acquisitions historically involve forced proceedings. But the sheer scale of new projects driven by AI power demand means that small percentage translates into a growing number of affected landowners.
This isn’t isolated to the South. In Pennsylvania, NextEra Energy Transmission MidAtlantic is pursuing eminent domain rights for high-voltage lines specifically designed to serve northern Virginia’s sprawling data center corridor. Maryland is seeing similar grid upgrade initiatives that are clearly intertwined with servicing private digital infrastructure.
The legal gray zone #
The Fifth Amendment allows the government to take private property for “public use” with “just compensation.” Legal challenges are popping up questioning whether transmission lines built primarily for private data centers actually qualify as public use. When 70-80% of the electricity flowing through a seized farmer’s former backyard goes to power AI model training for a tech corporation, the “public benefit” argument gets thin.
Courts, however, have historically sided with utilities in these disputes. The precedent is mixed but generally favorable for power companies, largely because transmission infrastructure is categorized as a public utility function regardless of who the end customer is.
Why the crypto industry should care #
Bitcoin miners already face hostile local politics in many jurisdictions. They’ve been blamed for grid strain in Texas, noise complaints in rural communities, and rising electricity costs for residential customers. If utilities can now forcibly acquire land to build infrastructure for AI data centers, the political and regulatory framework around energy-intensive tech operations is being rewritten in real time.
Polling shows that roughly 70% of Americans oppose having data centers and their associated infrastructure built in their neighborhoods. That’s a significant NIMBY headwind that could slow projects, increase costs, and create regulatory backlash.
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