Eminent Domain Meets AI Infrastructure

Georgia Power — a subsidiary of Southern Company — is building a 35-mile, 500-kilovolt transmission line through Coweta and Fayette counties. The destination: at least four massive AI data centers, including a QTS Data Center facility in Fayetteville, Georgia.

The price for locals: 20 to 30 homes face demolition. Another 300-plus properties will receive permanent easements — utility towers planted next to pools, in backyards, and alongside homes where families have lived for decades.

Georgia Power is using eminent domain to take what it needs.

The Compensation Gap

Ansley Brown, 27, became the face of local opposition after her TikTok post drew over 6 million views. Her mother bought their home in 2003 through a USDA rural development loan program for single mothers. Now Georgia Power wants the property for the transmission corridor.

Brown says compensation offers run $70,000 to $100,000 below market value. The video caught the attention of state lawmakers in Georgia.

The offer: accept it or fight it in court anyway.

Who Pays, Who Profits

Georgia Power executives have been explicit about the purpose. The company is adding roughly 10 gigawatts of new generating capacity over the next five years, with approximately 80% going to data centers — not residential customers or small businesses.

Yet Georgia Power's regulatory filings show residential customers absorbing a growing share of the cost burden. Utilities across the Southeast and Midwest have warned of double-digit residential rate hikes tied to data center expansion.

Hyperscale tech companies get the power. Homeowners get the towers and higher electric bills.

A Wider Problem

Project Wansley isn't isolated. The same pattern is repeating across the country:

• Northern Virginia counties have rejected new substations for data center expansion
• Texas communities are suing over water drawdowns and rate increases from data center load
• Communities nationwide are discovering that infrastructure investment has costs that don't appear in industry press releases

The pattern: hyperscale demand, local infrastructure constraints, costs spread to ratepayers, profits concentrated with shareholders.

The Industry's Story vs. Reality

Major outlets have framed the issue as grid modernization. Bloomberg emphasized "Transforming the Electrical Grid to Power AI." The Guardian reported on utilities like Iberdrola using AI to optimize grid operations and detect outages, even deploying Boston Dynamics robot dogs for substation inspections. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) has published research on AI for grid management and planning.

These advances are real. They're also the story the industry prioritizes.

None of these outlets showed Ansley Brown's front porch.

The Cost Shift

Why are residential ratepayers subsidizing infrastructure primarily serving trillion-dollar tech companies?

Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Meta — companies with combined market caps exceeding $10 trillion — are filling these data centers. Georgia Power's residential customers have household incomes far below that scale.

When a hyperscale data center demands 500 megawatts, infrastructure costs should follow that load to the operator. Instead, costs spread across the entire grid.

That transfers wealth from working families to tech giants.

On Your Bill

If you live near a proposed data center corridor in Georgia, Virginia, Texas, or the Southeast and Midwest, your home, backyard, and electric bill are in play. The infrastructure boom is real. So is the question of who's paying for it.

Ansley Brown didn't choose to. Her mother just needed a house.