Ansley Brown’s childhood home in Coweta County, Georgia, is going to be bulldozed. Not sold to a neighbor, not condemned for blight — bulldozed to clear a corridor for a transmission line. “They are going to bulldoze this entire property to the ground,” Brown told Fortune. “We don’t have a choice in this.”
She’s right that she doesn’t have a choice. That’s not a figure of speech — it’s the literal legal posture of eminent domain, and it’s the mechanism now clearing land across four Georgia counties for power lines that will spend roughly 80% of their capacity on AI data centers, not the homes they’re taking.
This is the first entry in a new series tracking how AI’s physical footprint — land, power, water, zoning — is reshaping property law faster than most of the people losing property have noticed.
By the numbers
- ~30 residential properties being acquired by sale or eminent domain
- 330+ parcels of land affected across the broader expansion
- 1,000+ miles of new transmission line planned across five separate projects
- 35 miles — length of the Ashley Park–Wansley segment alone
- 4 counties named: Fayette, Heard, Fulton, and Coweta
- ~10,000 megawatts of new transmission capacity certified by the Georgia Public Service Commission in December 2025
- ~80% of that capacity is expected to serve data centers, per the PSC–Georgia Power agreement
- 125% of appraised value — Georgia Power’s stated starting offer to affected landowners
- Less than 1% of Georgia Power’s land transactions involve eminent domain; the company says it used the power 5 times in the past year, on zero residential homes — a figure that predates this project’s active phase
- -$574 million — net fiscal impact of data center tax exemptions in Georgia through December 2025
Sources: Fortune, Tom’s Hardware
The legal mechanism, in plain terms
Eminent domain is the government’s power — or, as in this case, a power the government has delegated to a regulated utility — to take private property for public use in exchange for just compensation. The property owner cannot refuse the taking; the only thing left to negotiate is the price.
The doctrine traces to the Fifth Amendment’s Takings Clause: “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Georgia’s legislature extended that power to electric utilities directly. Under O.C.G.A. § 22-3-20, any person or company “operating or constructing or preparing to construct a plant for generating electricity” has the statutory right to “purchase, lease, or condemn rights of way or other easements over the lands of others” to run power lines — provided just compensation is paid first. O.C.G.A. § 22-1-1 defines a “condemning authority” broadly enough to include public utilities like Georgia Power, a regulated monopoly and subsidiary of Southern Company.
The company must post notice at least 15 days before a taking and serve the landowner personally with the condemnor’s name and contact information. None of that changes the outcome — only the timeline.
Whose “public use”
The Fifth Amendment says property can be taken for “public use.” What counts as public use has stretched considerably since the phrase was written. The Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005), held that “public use” extends to takings that serve a broader “public purpose,” including transferring land to private developers for economic development — so long as the taking is part of an integrated development plan, not a favor to one specific private party.
Georgia Power’s transmission project doesn’t need Kelo to clear the same bar the Norfolk ALPR case needed the Fourth Amendment to clear — the “public use” here is more conventional: electricity delivered over a regulated grid counts as public use even when a large share of the electricity is contracted to specific private customers. That’s the same logic that has always let utilities condemn land for power lines serving factories, hospitals, or subdivisions. What’s new isn’t the legal theory. It’s the customer at the other end of the line, and the scale: a single class of private commercial customer — AI data centers — is now driving enough new demand to justify condemning hundreds of parcels a state’s residents didn’t ask to be part of.
Georgia Power disputes the framing that this is for data centers rather than the grid generally. Company spokesperson Meredith Stone told Fortune the utility starts compensation negotiations “at 125% of the appraised value, and that’s just a starting point.” Attorney David Needham, who has represented affected landowners, put the imbalance more bluntly: “It’s a contract that’s very much tilted in favor of the power company. But there is compensation offered.”
This isn’t only a Georgia story
The same pattern — a regulated utility condemning private land for transmission lines primarily justified by data center demand — is showing up in at least four other states:
- Virginia: Dominion Energy’s “Golden to Mars” transmission project includes planned 185-foot towers on residential property near Ashburn.
- Pennsylvania: PPL Electric Utilities is condemning land across Union and Lycoming counties for a line proposed to serve a data center at Great Stream Commons in Allenwood.
- Maryland: The Public Service Enterprise Group’s Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project — a 67-mile line across Baltimore, Frederick, and Carroll counties — has drawn landowner signs reading “No eminent domain for corporate gain.”
- Indiana: AES Indiana is condemning land for a 10-mile, 345-kilovolt line in Morgan County tied to a Google data center planned near Monrovia.
Source: Newsweek
What we’re not saying
Nothing here alleges Georgia Power or any named utility broke the law. The condemnations described are being carried out under statutory authority that has existed, in some form, for over a century — this is how utility easements have always worked, for gas lines, water mains, and prior generations of power infrastructure. What’s changed is the scale and the customer. This entry establishes the mechanism and the numbers; it does not evaluate whether the compensation offered is fair, whether the PSC’s approval process gave affected residents adequate notice, or whether AI demand specifically — as opposed to grid modernization generally — justifies the taking. Those are open questions, not settled ones, and we’ll follow the ones that get tested in court or in the legislature.
Where this goes next
The Fourth Circuit is still deciding whether ALPR networks are a Fourth Amendment search. Georgia’s PSC has already decided that a data-center-driven transmission buildout counts as a Fifth Amendment “public use.” Both questions turn on the same underlying tension: how much of the AI buildout’s cost — in privacy, in property, in who gets condemned and who gets served — the public is expected to absorb without a direct vote on the tradeoff.
We’ll keep tracking the Georgia project as construction begins, and the parallel cases in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Indiana as they move through condemnation proceedings or legislatures.
Sources:
- Fortune — ‘My childhood home is being taken’: Eminent domain for data centers targets properties across a thousand miles of grid expansion in Georgia
- Fortune — Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers as 70% of Americans say not in my backyard
- Tom’s Hardware — 30 Georgia homes are being acquired via sale or eminent domain to expand power grid
- Newsweek — Land Faces Being Seized in Multiple States to Build Data Centers
- O.C.G.A. § 22-3-20 — Power of persons operating or constructing electric plants to purchase, lease, or condemn rights of way and easements
- O.C.G.A. § 22-1-1 — Definitions (condemning authority)
- Kelo v. City of New London, 545 U.S. 469 (2005) — Oyez case summary