Power companies are using the government's seizure power to take private land from American citizens and run transmission lines to Big Tech data centers — and the trillion-dollar companies footing the bill don't have to negotiate with you at all.

The AI boom has triggered a data center building spree across the country, with more than 3,000 centers already operating and another 1,500 in development, according to a Pew Research Center analysis cited by UPI News. These facilities consumed more than 4% of the nation's total electricity in 2024, and demand is climbing. Where private landowners refuse to sell easements for the transmission lines these centers require, power companies are turning to eminent domain — the government's authority to force a sale — to get it done. States including Georgia and Pennsylvania have already seen these actions.

The constitutional standard is supposed to be strict: the Fifth Amendment permits taking private property only for "public use" and with "just compensation." But the U.S. Supreme Court blew the doors off that limit in 2005 with Kelo v. City of New London, ruling that economic development alone qualifies as public use — allowing a Connecticut city to seize homes for private development around a Pfizer facility. That redevelopment never materialized, and Pfizer eventually left town. Forty-five states passed reform laws in response, but the underlying framework still allows governments to delegate eminent domain power to utilities and so-called "common carriers."

Enter Meta. The company is spending $50 billion to expand its Hyperion data center in Richland Parish, Louisiana — more than one-third of its projected 2026 capital expenditure range of $125 billion to $145 billion, Barchart reported. The facility's planned capacity has jumped from 2 gigawatts to 5 gigawatts. Meta Vice President of Data Centers Rachel Peterson said the company wanted a place where it could "expand into gigawatts pretty quickly" on "very, very large contiguous plots of land" with immediate energy access.

The site — a former farm called the Franklin Farm mega site — had been pre-certified and marketed by Entergy, the regional utility, through its site selection center. Barchart noted that Entergy "had done years of preparatory work on power access and transmission routing before Meta even arrived." The region also sits next to the Haynesville Shale gas field, giving Entergy a cheap, nearby fuel source for the gas turbines Meta needs.

That's the deal in plain view: a regulated utility prepares the ground — including the transmission routes that may cross your property — and a trillion-dollar tech company reaps the benefit. When landowners won't sell, the utility can invoke eminent domain because it's a "common carrier," even if the power line primarily serves a private corporation's servers. In Texas, the state Supreme Court has held that a project must "serve the public" and "cannot be built only for the builder's exclusive use" to qualify. Whether other states will enforce that standard against AI infrastructure remains an open fight.

Seven in 10 Americans already oppose data center construction in their communities, citing higher utility bills, pollution, noise, and lost green space. Meta posted $56.3 billion in Q1 revenue and holds $23.4 billion in cash. The company can afford to pay landowners whatever they ask. Instead, the mechanism of choice is a government power that lets a utility sidestep the negotiation entirely.

The question now is whether "public use" means anything at all when the public isn't the one being served — or whether your property is just a route on Entergy's map to Meta's server farm.