The New Land Grab Has a Name

There are more than 3,000 data centers operating in the United States right now. Another 1,500 are in development, according to Pew Research. Most of them are being built in rural areas where land is cheap and communities are small. But the infrastructure needed to power them — the transmission lines, the substations, the pipelines — doesn't stop at the data center fence line. It cuts across farms, through backyards, and over hills that families have owned for generations.

And when those families say no, utilities are turning to an old legal weapon that was never designed for this fight: eminent domain.

The AI buildout is consuming electricity at a rate the grid was never built to handle. Data centers accounted for more than 4% of U.S. electricity consumption in 2024, a figure that could hit 12% by 2028 according to the Department of Energy. To deliver that power, utilities need new transmission corridors. And across Georgia, Virginia, and Ohio right now, those corridors are being carved through private property — with or without the owner's consent.

Georgia: 300 Parcels and Counting

Georgia Power is acquiring more than 300 separate parcels across rural Georgia for a new transmission line. By the utility's own admission, 70 to 80 percent of the capacity will go to data centers. Not to households. Not to hospitals or schools. To private AI infrastructure whose corporate customers the utility refuses to name, citing "safety and security."

Ansley Brown's mother bought her Coweta County home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan for single mothers. It is the family home — the place Brown grew up. Georgia Power wants it for a transmission line. When the utility's surveyors appeared, Brown described it bluntly: "It's ours. It's our family. It's being stripped from us."

The family initially refused the utility's offer. But facing the legal machinery of a billion-dollar corporation with state authority to compel the sale, Brown's mother eventually accepted the terms. "It's literally a billion-dollar company stealing land from smaller people, people who can't fight back," Brown told CBS News. She has taken the fight to TikTok, posting stories of other affected residents.

Georgia Power spokesperson Holly Lovett says eminent domain is "always a last resort" and that the company has "worked hard to be transparent, negotiate in good faith." But transparency has limits when the utility won't disclose which data center companies benefit from the land being taken.

Virginia: The Route Even the Regulator Admits Is Inferior

In Loudoun County, Virginia — home to "Data Center Alley," the densest concentration of data centers on the planet — the fight takes a different shape but tells the same story. Dominion Energy's "Golden to Mars" transmission project calls for a 500-kilovolt power line carried on 185-foot poles, taller than most 15-story buildings and the Statue of Liberty. It will cut through the Broad Run River Valley, a forested corridor conservationists have flagged for wildlife habitat. One hundred eighty-two homes sit within 500 feet of the proposed route.

Madison Taggart's family is one of them. The "call from hell," as her mother describes it, came on Friday the 13th. Dominion Energy asked permission to walk their property for a proposed alternate route called 3A — a route that arrived with no public meeting and no advance notice. The Taggarts' backyard, where Madison sledded as a child and where her grandmother's garden still grows, is now the stage of a legal war.

Here's the part that should make you angry: When the Virginia State Corporate Commission issued its final order on June 29, it admitted that Route 3A is "clearly inferior" to alternatives by "almost every objective measure" — longer, costlier, and closer to more homes. The commission approved it anyway, citing an "urgent" need to keep data center power reliable.

The numbers explain why urgency won. In 2022, PJM Interconnection projected the Dominion zone would add 5,700 megawatts of new load by 2037. By 2025, that same forecast had quadrupled to more than 20,000 megawatts. Summer peak demand hit 23,905 megawatts in 2025 alone — 23 percent higher than 2019. The industry grew faster than its own planning and is now building through people's woods to catch up.

The Loudoun County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution demanding the route be reconsidered before the SCC's order becomes permanent on July 20. The HOA deeded 12 acres to the school board for leverage. As of this writing, the outcome is uncertain — but the pattern is not.

Ohio: The One That Got Away

In Wood County, Ohio, the Luidhardt family has been farming the same land for three generations. Then Will-Power — a pipeline affiliate of Williams Companies — came with an offer: sell some of the acreage for a natural gas pipeline to power Meta's new data center in Middleton Township. The Luidhardts said no.

Unlike the families in Georgia and Virginia, the Luidhardts had legal firepower on their side. They reached out to Maurice Thompson of the 1851 Center for Constitutional Law, who intervened with the Ohio Power Siting Board. Thompson's argument was straightforward: Ohioans' private property cannot be taken simply to benefit purely private corporate projects. "This is redistribution of wealth of the worst sort," Thompson wrote, "taking property from regular Ohioans and giving it to California billionaires for their own benefit, under the false pretense of progress."

The Apollo power plant serving Meta was fast-tracked through the state's "expedited review process" — approved with no public hearings because it operates "behind-the-meter" for a single customer and isn't connected to the electric grid. But when Thompson's legal challenge exposed the eminent domain play, Will-Power backed down. They submitted a new map routing the pipeline around the Luidhardts' land instead of through it.

"When we shine a light on that issue, the takers tend to scatter like cockroaches," Thompson said. The Luidhardts won this round. But the pipeline is still being built. Other landowners on the route may not have a constitutional law firm in their corner. And the data center is still being powered.

What This Means: The System Is Working Exactly as Designed

These three stories — Georgia, Virginia, Ohio — aren't bugs in the system. They are features. The AI infrastructure buildout requires land, power, and transmission capacity at volumes the existing grid was not designed to deliver. Eminent domain is the legal mechanism that exists precisely to resolve this kind of conflict when voluntary negotiations fail.

The question none of these cases has cleanly answered: Does a transmission line built to serve a private data center qualify as "public use"? The Fifth Amendment's takings clause allows the government to seize private property for public use with just compensation. In the 2005 Kelo v. New London decision, the Supreme Court said economic development qualifies. But 45 states enacted reform laws in response, and state supreme courts in Michigan, Ohio, and Oklahoma have prohibited seizure purely for private economic development.

Georgia Power won't name which companies benefit from its 300-parcel land acquisition. Dominion Energy admitted its preferred route is "clearly inferior" and approved it anyway. The Ohio company rerouted only after facing a constitutional challenge it didn't want to litigate. Each case tests the same boundary: How much of the public's land are we willing to transfer to private AI infrastructure before we call it what it is?

The Data Center Power Crisis in Numbers

To understand the scale driving these conflicts, look at the hard numbers:

• 3,000 data centers operating in the U.S., 1,500 more in development (Pew Research)
• 7 in 10 Americans oppose data centers in their communities (Gallup)
• Data centers consumed 4% of U.S. electricity in 2024, projected to reach 12% by 2028
• PJM Dominion zone load forecast: 5,700 MW (2022) → 20,000+ MW (2025) — quadrupled in three years
• Georgia Power: 300+ parcels being acquired, 70-80% of capacity to data centers
• Virginia: 185-foot poles, 182 homes within 500 feet, SCC admits chosen route is "clearly inferior"
• Ohio: Pipeline offers up to $200,000/acre, expedited approval with no public hearings

These are not isolated incidents. They are a national pattern emerging in real time, state by state, family by family.

What Comes Next

The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has not yet issued guidance specific to AI-driven load growth. Several state utility commissions have begun examining whether the public interest standard for eminent domain should account for the proportion of a project's capacity going to private commercial customers. Georgia has not formally reached that question. Virginia's SCC has decided it is more urgent to get the power flowing than to ask whose land it crosses.

As more data centers come online and power demand accelerates, more families will get that call. More surveyors will walk properties that have been in the same family for generations. More communities will discover that the legal framework built to support public infrastructure like hospitals and schools is now being applied to private AI companies whose names they aren't even told.

The Luidhardts won their fight because they had a lawyer who understood the system. The Taggarts are still fighting with a community behind them. The Browns accepted a deal they never should have had to make. The next family to get that phone call may not be so lucky.

The AI revolution is coming for your electricity, your water, and your land. The only question is whether the rules will change before it takes them.

— Allan Ali, Sylt.ing

===SUMMARY=== Georgia Power is seizing 300+ rural parcels for data center transmission lines. Virginia regulators approved a "clearly inferior" route. Ohio farmers fought back and won — for now. The AI buildout's hidden cost is your property rights.