ATLANTA – Ansley Brown describes the surveyors walking her mother’s property as theft. “It’s ours. It’s our family,” she told CBS News. “It’s being stripped from us.” Georgia Power is building a new transmission line. By the utility’s own account, 70 to 80 percent of the power it will carry goes to data centers.
That ratio has become the center of a property rights dispute affecting more than 300 separate parcels across rural Georgia. Some owners have accepted the utility’s offer. Others are fighting. Brown’s mother, facing the prospect of formal eminent domain proceedings against a billion-dollar company, eventually accepted the terms to avoid the process entirely. The fight was not one she felt she could win.
“To us it’s theft,” Brown told CBS News. “It’s literally a billion dollar company stealing land from smaller people, people who can’t fight back.” After no coordinated response emerged from local officials, Brown began posting affected residents’ stories on TikTok. “You can’t tear down 35 miles of rural Georgia and it not hurt something or somebody,” she said. “My mom wants an apology from Georgia Power. That’s it.”
Georgia Power spokesperson Holly Lovett said eminent domain is “always a last resort” and something “we never want to do.” The company, she added, has “worked hard to be transparent, negotiate in good faith.” Eminent domain is the legal authority that allows utilities and governments to compel land sales for infrastructure deemed in the public interest. Georgia law extends that power to utility companies for transmission projects. Whether the public interest standard is satisfied when 70 to 80 percent of a line’s capacity will serve private data center customers is a question the state’s regulatory framework has not settled.
Georgia Power declined to identify which data center companies will receive the electricity. The utility cited “safety and security” for its refusal. The consequence is that the families being asked to sell their land do not know which corporations benefit from the transaction. Technology companies with significant data center presence in Georgia include several of the largest in the United States, but the utility has not confirmed which of them are customers for this specific project.
The scale of demand driving these acquisitions reflects a structural shift in the US power grid. AI infrastructure construction has pushed utilities across the South and Midwest to accelerate transmission projects that their existing planning cycles were not built to handle. Earlier this month, Meta announced plans for a C$13 billion data center in Alberta, Canada, noting that land rights and a confirmed power source had not yet been secured. In Georgia, those details are not future problems. They are present-tense eminent domain proceedings.
The legal asymmetry in these cases is difficult to ignore. Georgia Power holds state authority to compel sales, employs attorneys experienced in acquisition proceedings, and has executed hundreds of similar transactions. Families on the other side have the right to negotiate, the option to litigate at their own expense, and, in Brown’s case, a TikTok account. “My mom wants an apology,” Brown said. No apology has been issued.
The broader question being tested in cases like this is who pays the non-monetary cost of AI infrastructure. The commercial AI race has driven demand for computing power to levels that transmission grids built for earlier eras were not designed to accommodate. The solution utilities have reached is to expand those grids, and the land those grids cross belongs to someone. In rural areas, those landowners typically lack the legal resources and political connections that would make their resistance visible.
The Federal Energy Regulatory Commission has yet to issue guidance specific to AI-driven load growth, which is creating transmission demand at a pace that existing planning processes were not designed to handle. Several state utility commissions have begun examining whether the public interest standard for eminent domain should account for the proportion of a project’s capacity that goes to private commercial customers rather than general residential service. Georgia has not yet reached that question formally.
What Ansley Brown and her family are left with is a situation that the law permits and that the company insists was handled fairly. The land is gone or going. The power line will be built. The data centers it will serve remain unnamed. “It’s ours,” Brown said of the property. “It’s our family. We belong here.” That argument, as she has discovered, does not have a provision in Georgia’s utility law.
