Georgia Power wants more than 300 land parcels across 35 miles of rural Coweta County to build a new transmission line, and it has told holdout homeowners the alternative is condemnation. The utility calls it Project Wansley. Seventy to eighty percent of the line's capacity is earmarked for four AI data centers, not the homes it runs past. Ansley Brown, whose mother Angela Hall has owned their Coweta County house since 2003, told CBS News what the offer felt like: "To us, it's theft. It's literally a billion-dollar company stealing land from smaller people, people who can't fight back." Georgia Power spokesperson Holly Lovett says condemnation "is always...a last resort." Fortune's coverage of the broader fight lays out the legal question underneath all of it: whether powering AI data centers counts as the "public use" the Fifth Amendment requires before government can take someone's land.
The Fifth Amendment allows government to take private property only for public use, with just compensation. The Supreme Court gutted that limit in 2005, ruling in Kelo v. City of New London that economic development alone satisfies public use. Forty-five states passed eminent domain reform laws in response. None stopped this. Courts have split specifically on transmission lines: the supreme courts of South Dakota and Vermont upheld utility seizures because the lines delivered at least some power and reliability to in-state customers, while Mississippi's Supreme Court struck down a 1984 seizure because the line ran through the state into Louisiana without serving a single Mississippi customer. Georgia's four AI data centers sit inside the state, the same fact that saved utilities in South Dakota and Vermont.
Coweta County is not isolated. Fortune's reporting found utilities pursuing eminent domain for AI-driven transmission projects in Pennsylvania and Oregon too, and in Festus, Missouri, resident Dee Politte fought a proposed data center at a June 2026 city council meeting over the same buildout logic. Organized opposition groups have already doubled to 833 in a single quarter, and condemnation fights are becoming the sharpest edge of that opposition because grid capacity is already the primary bottleneck in data center development. Utilities lean on eminent domain because negotiating with hundreds of individual landowners moves slower than a compute buildout schedule tolerates. Virginia shows the land economics driving that math: the parcel neighboring a data center baron's spread, the one a sitting vice president now rents next to, sold for $615 million.
Nobody in this fight is talking about why the transmission capacity has to be this large. A gigawatt of AI compute needs more than a gigawatt of delivered power because heat rejection is not free: legacy air-cooled plants running chillers, CRAH units, and cooling towers commonly carry a PUE of 1.5 to 1.6, adding 500 to 600 megawatts of parasitic draw for every gigawatt of IT load, by widely cited industry benchmarks. Direct-to-chip liquid cooling on warm-water loops brings that closer to 1.1 to 1.2. Applied across a four-data-center customer base the size of Project Wansley's, that gap is the difference between 300 condemned parcels and a fraction of that number.
Engineers picking cooling architecture are sizing how much of somebody's backyard gets taken, whether they mean to or not. An operator who specs air-cooled economizers over liquid cooling to save capital cost on the mechanical plant pushes that cost onto the transmission budget instead, and from there onto a landowner who never got a vote. The line still gets built. The only question is how many acres it costs to run it.