There is a legal tool in the United States called eminent domain. It allows governments, and companies they designate, to take private land without the owner agreeing, as long as the owner receives payment. It was designed for roads, schools, and public infrastructure. It is now being used to lay electricity lines for AI data centers.
In Georgia, Georgia Power is building transmission lines across two counties to feed at least four AI data centers. More than 330 private properties sit in the path. Between 20 and 30 homes are expected to be demolished entirely. The families affected do not even know which company's servers they are making room for: the tech tenants are undisclosed, citing "security concerns."
This is not one isolated case. In Pennsylvania, a Florida-based energy company called NextEra is asking for the same powers to build a 107-mile line from southwest Pennsylvania to Northern Virginia, the largest data center market in the world. In Maryland, farmers along a 67-mile proposed line have staked signs along the highway that read "No eminent domain for corporate gain."
The core legal question is whether clearing private land to power a private company's facility counts as serving "the public." Courts have been inconsistent on this. State supreme courts in South Dakota and Vermont have allowed seizures by power companies, ruling that grid reliability benefits local customers. But in 1984, the Mississippi Supreme Court rejected a similar case because the line in question carried electricity out of state without benefiting Mississippi residents at all. That precedent matters now, because some of the lines being built today primarily serve a handful of large corporate tenants, not ordinary households.
In Georgia, estimates suggest that 70 to 80 percent of the electricity carried by the new lines will go directly to data centers, leaving only 20 to 30 percent for standard residential and commercial use. That imbalance is exactly the kind of fact a landowner's lawyer would use in court. Under current Georgia law, though, homeowners face an uphill path. Once a project is approved by state regulators, the practical legal fight shifts from stopping the taking to arguing about the price. Several families believe Georgia Power's initial offers came in roughly $100,000 below real market value.
The land seizure story is only half of the picture. The other half is who pays for all the new infrastructure being built. Under current billing rules across most of the US, utilities spread construction costs across all customers. Utilities requested more than $29 billion in rate increases in the first half of 2025 alone, double the amount requested in the same period of 2024. In the grid region covering 13 mid-Atlantic and Midwest states, data center demand has been identified as the primary reason for $23 billion in customer price increases lasting through at least 2028. Residential electricity prices rose 11.5 percent in 2025, outpacing inflation, and prices could rise a further 40 percent by 2030.
Some states are beginning to respond. Delaware, Florida, and Oklahoma are each considering separate rules that would either charge data centers higher rates or temporarily pause new construction until the grid impact is better understood. New York's governor ordered the first statewide moratorium on new data centers in July 2026. At least 16 major projects were blocked or delayed nationally in 2025 due to community opposition.
The federal government has so far sided with growth. The White House has promoted AI as a national security priority, and a voluntary "Ratepayer Protection Pledge" signed by Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and others was announced to signal industry goodwill. But existing billing rules make voluntary pledges hard to enforce: a utility told federal energy regulators in 2026 that current rules require infrastructure costs to be spread across all customers regardless of what any individual company agrees to pay.
For anyone who owns land near a planned data center or transmission corridor, the most useful step is legal advice early, before an offer arrives. Challenging the taking itself is difficult; challenging the price is realistic. For anyone who simply pays an electricity bill, the cost trajectory is already moving upward and the policy decisions that will shape how much further it goes are being made now at state utility commissions, not in tech boardrooms.