Energy Law & Infrastructure

When a Power Line Serves Only a Data Center, Can the Government Still Seize Your Land?

The AI boom has created a power crunch. To build the transmission lines that data centers need, utility companies are increasingly leaning on eminent domain — an old constitutional tool that is now meeting a modern, and controversial, test.

• Eminent domain lets the government take private land, with fair compensation, when the taking is for "public use" — a power embedded in the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment.
• Data-center operators themselves rarely hold this power; it is the public utility building the grid connection that invokes it, framing the line as part of the shared electricity network.
• Opponents argue that a line running to a single private campus — and used mostly by one customer — should not qualify, but courts have historically given utilities wide latitude.

Normally a utility would simply buy an easement from a landowner willing to sell. When a landowner refuses, the utility can petition the state to force a sale through condemnation proceedings, paying a court-determined price. The public-interest standard has historically covered roads, schools, dams and transmission corridors — infrastructure nobody owns privately but everyone benefits from.

The fresh wrinkle is scale and purpose. A multi-billion-dollar hyperscale campus, such as the "Project Sail" development powering large AI workloads, may draw the vast majority of a new transmission line's capacity. Rural landowners in states from Georgia to Ohio are now asking whether their backyards are really being taken for "public use," or effectively for a single private client that happens to wear a utility's name on the construction permit.

The real stakes are not just legal but cultural: farms, family homesteads and long-standing rural communities are being redrawn by invisible demand generated thousands of miles away. Whether courts expand or narrow the public-use definition will decide who foots the local bill for the AI era's electricity.