Georgia Power, NextEra Use Eminent Domain for AI Data Centers

The AI power buildout is starting to show up as condemnation notices in landowners' mailboxes, and a piece in Fortune by University of Dayton assistant law professor Aaron Walayat walks through why the courts are unusually split on whether that is constitutional. The reporting flags Georgia and Pennsylvania as the two states where power companies are actively invoking eminent domain to run transmission lines toward data-center loads. Georgia Power's project reportedly involves a 35-mile line crossing more than 300 land parcels, with 70 to 80 percent of the new capacity serving data centers. In the Mid-Atlantic, a subsidiary of Florida-based NextEra Energy has proposed the MidAtlantic Resiliency Link, a 500-kilovolt line running roughly 105 to 110 miles across Pennsylvania, Maryland, West Virginia and Virginia.

The legal question is whether a transmission line whose main beneficiary is a private data-center campus counts as a Fifth Amendment 'public use.' Walayat's read is that seizing land to shore up grid reliability will likely qualify, particularly where the intent is to serve in-state customers, but he notes that arguments over whether the lines actually serve in-state customers give landowners a real basis to challenge. The precedent is a patchwork. South Dakota and Vermont supreme courts have affirmed utility condemnations on reliability grounds. Michigan, Ohio and Oklahoma have gone the other way, barring seizures where property is handed to a private party purely for economic development. Mississippi rejected a transmission-line condemnation in 1984 because the line wouldn't benefit in-state customers. And Kelo v. City of New London, the 2005 case that greenlit economic-development takings around a Pfizer facility that eventually left the city, prompted 45 states to pass reform laws that landowners can now invoke.

Why this matters if you are not a landowner or a utility lawyer: roughly 70% of Americans already oppose data-center construction in their communities, and data centers took more than 4% of U.S. electricity in 2024. If the political story turns into a constitutional one, the schedule for AI capacity in a given state starts to depend on which state supreme court hears the challenge, not just on how fast a hyperscaler can pour concrete.

The honest caveat is that the Fortune piece is a legal scholar's explainer, not a reporting deep-dive. It doesn't name the specific data-center tenants anchoring the Georgia Power or NextEra lines, doesn't disclose the just-compensation figures being offered, and doesn't say how utility commissions plan to split transmission costs between data-center customers and residential ratepayers. Those are the numbers that decide whether landowner outrage stays local or becomes a genuine constraint on the buildout.

For operators, the strategic tell is that jurisdiction is quietly becoming a siting variable in its own right. Reliability-friendly states are safer places to route a line than the Michigan/Ohio/Oklahoma bloc, and hyperscalers willing to co-locate their own generation on campus can sidestep the condemnation fight altogether.