No eminent domain for AI data centers
Plus: three cakes I made, about that encyclical, and more
Good morning! It’s Wednesday, and here’s this week’s post. As a reminder, my third book, In Defense of Evangelicalism: A Response to Its Cultured Despisers, releases on September 1. Take a look at its gorgeous cover, and:
There’s a young woman down in Georgia named Ansley Brown who’s getting some traction on TikTok and X (where I first saw her). She’s talking about eminent domain plans that will destroy her mother’s home so a utility called Georgia Power can build new power lines to serve a data center for artificial intelligence programs:
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Only a handful of news outlets have picked up Brown’s story to date, but the basics seem to be well-established—including via a lengthy statement from the utility itself. Here’s the gist:
Georgia Power is a privately held company. It’s not a government agency, but rather a subsidiary of Southern Company, a massive gas and electric provider. It’s acquiring land to run new power lines that the company says will “serve increased load growth in the area, which may include new manufacturing and residents, data centers, as well as add overall reliability and resiliency for the area. It is not to serve any single customer.”
That may well be true, but it could also be true at the same time, as Brown suggests, that this extra capacity wouldn’t be needed were it not for new construction of data centers specifically. A local news story confirms that at least one data center is involved here, and it’s plausible that the data center(s) is the straw that broke the camel’s back, even if there’s a lot more straw.
“Data center load growth is the primary reason for recent and expected [electricity] capacity market conditions, including total forecast load growth, the tight supply and demand balance, and high prices,” said a March report from an independent electric market monitor.
In any case, that the plan is to use eminent domain to seize and demolish Brown’s childhood home—along with “20 to 30” other houses—is not in dispute.
Georgia Power says it offered Brown’s mother, Angie Hall, a price well above market value in a deal that Hall initially accepted, then stalled. Brown says the deal is on pause because the family doesn’t want to sell and because the payment would come in a form that could trigger federal taxes, meaning it’s functionally lower than the ostensibly generous sticker price. She also says Georgia Power has threatened to have the home condemned if an agreement isn’t reached soon.
On the subject of credibility in these competing claims, it’s worth noting that Georgia Power told the press that “using eminent domain is a last resort for our company and, in fact, comprises less than 1 percent of all of the land transactions each year.” But in this particular project, 330 properties are in the path of the new power lines, and as many as 30 of those are subject to eminent domain. So while that “less than 1 percent” figure may well be accurate for the company’s overall property acquisition, on this project, it’s off by a factor of 10.
Now, there’s a sense in which the artificial intelligence piece of this story is a distraction. My point is not that it’s bad for Brown’s mom to lose her house because AI is bad and therefore there should be no data centers.
I’m very skeptical of many proposed uses for AI, but as I’ve argued here before, its utility costs are wholly relative to the value of its output. If AI is doing a lot of good, then probably we do want to use a lot of electricity for it, which may well mean building new data centers and power lines. And as skeptical as I am, I think the good it does is not zero, so I’m not categorically against this kind of construction.
The issue is that Georgia Power is a private company that appears to be using eminent domain to take people’s homes against their will to meet other private companies’ expansion plans.
It’s tricky, because utilities have been able to do this longer than most businesses. This is explained in a history of eminent domain in America from the Institute for Justice (IJ), a nonprofit law firm that’s been involved in major cases on this issue (bolding mine):
The founders were concerned about the potential abuse of eminent domain—an early U.S. Supreme Court decision even refers to it as “the despotic power”—so they limited its use through the “takings clause” of the Fifth Amendment: “[N]or shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” The clause limits eminent domain in two ways: first, the government can only take private property for a “public use” and second, the government must pay for it. […]
For most of the 19th and early 20th centuries, governments permitted eminent domain to be used only for true public uses, such as roads, bridges, parks, and public buildings and facilities. The courts began authorizing a slight expansion of the power when they allowed private companies like railroads and public utilities to take property for the laying of railroad tracks and transmission lines—but these companies were tightly regulated and had to provide the public equal access to the rail lines or utilities.
I have an instinct against eminent domain for private companies even when it’s for utilities serving the general public. I’d strongly prefer they play by the rules of the free market and get what they need without coercion, even if it costs a lot.
But I do understand the case for these select exceptions because of how utilities interact with geography, so I grasp why this kind of eminent domain has been permitted for so long. Yet eminent domain for a utility that is—or, as here, seems to be—serving one particular company or industry strikes me as something of a different animal. It’s not quite the same as eminent domain for straightforwardly private purposes, but it’s only one step removed. It strikes me as a kind of theft and corruption, only lightly disguised, an abuse of a system intended for better ends.
In that sense, my headline here could equally be “No eminent domain for casinos,” “No eminent domain for housing developers,” “No eminent domain for colleges,” no eminent domain for any private project, no matter how good or bad I believe it to be, whether directly or with a utility as middle man, because it is indefensible to thus covet and confiscate your neighbor’s house.
Unfortunately, eminent domain for private projects is legal in this country. As the IJ history documents, since the 1950s, the courts have again and again loosened the rules for this kind of seizure, finally dispensing with the Constitution’s public use requirement altogether:
[T]he U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2005 that private property may be seized for private commercial development, based on the possibility of increased tax revenue or jobs. In Kelo v. City of New London, Susette Kelo and a six other homeowners in New London, Connecticut, had their property taken through eminent domain for private economic development projects. The City didn’t even declare their properties “slum” or “blighted”—their sole rationale was that someone else could make more money off of their land than the current owners could.
The Kelo decision was wildly unpopular with Americans—eight in 10 opposed it across political and demographic lines—and to my mind transparently unjust and unconstitutional. Justice Sandra Day O’Connor agreed in her Kelo dissent.
“Any property may now be taken for the benefit of another private party, but the fallout from this decision will not be random,” she warned. “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.”
“As for the victims,” O’Connor continued, “the government now has license to transfer property from those with fewer resources to those with more. The Founders cannot have intended this perverse result.” It’s easy to map Brown and Georgia Power onto this prediction.
Since Kelo, many states have passed laws to limit private applications of eminent domain within their borders. “But abusive takings still continue in many parts of the country,” legal scholar Ilya Somin observes at The Volokh Conspiracy, “and state action is not a sufficient substitute for systematic nationwide enforcement of the Fifth Amendment’s public use requirement.”
Again, the apparent situation in Georgia is complex. I can’t be sure that Brown is correct in her suggestion that the new lines would not be built in the absence of this data center(s), though I think she’s very possibly right.
Moreover, it would be difficult to regulate that kind of private use at one remove, to determine which utility expansions are primarily and necessarily in service to private parties even if they also contribute to general utility provision. Still, eminent domain of that kind strikes me as a violation at least of the spirit of the Fifth Amendment and worth careful consideration as data center expansion continues apace.
“It makes you feel like America is not free,” Ansley Brown told a reporter of Georgia Power’s plan to take her mom’s home. It sure does.
Odds & ends
Reading Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in North America, by David Hackett Fischer
I have not read the papal encyclical on AI so have nothing informed to say about it at present, though my former colleague Matthew Walther’s take on it in the Times is high on my to-read list
“A Florida detention center was the harshest in the country. Then ICE stopped tracking details on use of force,” by C.J. Ciaramella for Reason
[A drop in use of force reports] coincides with a nationwide documentation collapse that occurred several months after Trump took office. Biden-era reports often contained short narratives of the incidents, including the circumstances and types of force used, but those narratives largely disappear from ICE reports in 2025, replaced by boilerplate language.
Detainee injuries are still reported, but not their exact cause. For example, a September 2025 report notes that a Bahamian detainee at Krome “sustained several contusions and a lacerated lip,” but all other details are omitted.
Haley Byrd Wilt on Babel:
Rebellion’s culmination, cheaper,
uglier than imagined. Builders’ hearts
deadened, tower leaning sideways
while they crow with leering pretension.
It is already collapsing beneath them.
Still they worship the crumbling tower
on their knees, false god, long awaited
savior half-incarnated.
And it worships them.
We got this affordable balance board for one of our twins for his birthday, and it is well-made and a ton of fun—I am using it probably 20 times a day
Speaking of the birthdays, the three cakes I made:
raspberry-nectarine icebox cake (my favorite, and no baking! handy as it gets hot out)
I have just finished 7 years on the Frederick County (MD) Sustainability Commission after 40 years in industrial (including coal-fired power) power plants. Like you, I decry AI. Data center expansion here is a hot, very hot, issue here in the County. Revenue need is allowing some with restraint due to awareness of environmental impact. Would that we could stop "progress". We collectively cannot manage our ability to innovate and we get awed by our inventions. Unfortunately cyber warfare drives some of the innovation which hinders better restraint but I don't like allowing the convenience of AI even for faster data collection. It dumbs us down. For me, the environmental cost alone of AI should stop it's proliferation Maryland an my area are impacted by the Maryland Piedmont Reliability Project which is the same issue of power lines through farms. The problem is that data centers and the money involved put burden on the people and threaten reliability of the grid. Greed is mammon and too many serve that god.
I’ve included a link to a Piedmont Environmental Council article describing a massive “electric super highway” planned to slash a massive gash through the Virginia Piedmont, (carefully avoiding any damage to lovely, expensive and elite Charlottesville) to provide power for (guess what?) the data centers of Northern Virginia. If you don’t have time to read the article, there are a couple of compelling illustrations that bring the scope of the project into focus.
https://www.pecva.org/work/energy-work/transmission/an-electric-super-highway-through-the-piedmont/