The AI boom's hunger for electricity is running into an old legal tool: eminent domain.
According to Tom's Hardware, citing a report, power companies can use eminent domain law to seize private land in order to build the new transmission lines needed to supply electricity to data centers. In practice, that means a utility could take a citizen's property to make way for power infrastructure when the owner refuses to sell.
Eminent domain is the long-standing government power that allows private land to be taken for public use, typically with compensation. Utilities have historically been able to invoke it for infrastructure like transmission lines. What is new here is the driver: the surging demand from AI data centers, which require enormous amounts of power and, in turn, more high-voltage lines to carry it.
Tom's Hardware notes that this authority is not unlimited. The takeovers would still be bound by public-use requirements and by state-law limits, which vary from place to place. In other words, a utility cannot simply seize any parcel it wants — the taking has to clear existing legal standards for what counts as public use, and individual states set their own additional constraints.
The reporting frames the scenario around what happens when private citizens decline to sell their land voluntarily, leaving eminent domain as the fallback mechanism for utilities pushing new lines through.
Why it matters: as tech companies race to build AI infrastructure, the cost may not fall on data centers alone — ordinary landowners could find their property in the path of the power lines feeding the AI economy.