Eminent domain for me, but not for thee
Anti-government tech billionaires are leveraging eminent domain to seize private land, laundering closed-loop data centers as public utilities.
By Ida Vann
Sparked by Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers · discussion
The exact same tech billionaires who spent the past decade preaching about a "frictionless, permissionless" future are now quietly relying on the state's most coercive domestic tool to seize private land for their artificial intelligence servers. According to a recent Fortune report, utility companies are systematically invoking eminent domain to forcibly acquire private property for high-voltage transmission lines dedicated almost entirely to powering new data centers.
It is a staggering display of philosophical flexibility. In his widely circulated The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, venture capitalist Marc Andreessen explicitly categorized the administrative state as "our enemy." The document rails against regulation, centralized planning, and any governmental friction that might slow down the march of technological progress. Yet, when those same investors realize that running thousands of GPUs requires more physical electricity than the open market can organically provide, their libertarian posturing evaporates. Suddenly, the coercive power of the government becomes a required business partner, eagerly leveraged to bulldoze residential backyards and farmland so Silicon Valley can train slightly worse chatbots.
That is convenient.
To be entirely fair to the utility operators, the American electrical grid is aging and fundamentally ill-equipped for modern demands. Legitimate public grid upgrades to prevent cascading brownouts are a genuine civic good. When a public utility commission authorizes new infrastructure to keep the heat on for three million residents during a winter storm, those upgrades do occasionally require the unpleasant tool of eminent domain. The state has a compelling, established interest in ensuring that one obstinate landowner cannot plunge an entire municipality into darkness.
But the utilities and their tech-monopoly partners are deliberately blurring the line between civic necessity and corporate subsidy. They are legally classifying dedicated transmission lines—built exclusively to feed private, closed-loop AI server farms—as a public benefit simply because those lines physically tie into the wider regional grid. It is an extraordinary regulatory loophole, laundering private corporate power demands as public grid reliability in order to legally justify land theft.
The human collateral damage of this regulatory fiction is already playing out at the local level. In Maryland, agricultural and residential communities are desperately protesting the construction of massive new power corridors designed to carve through conservation land and private property, as documented by Data Center Dynamics. The purported justification for these sprawling high-voltage lines is reliably framed around regional electrical stability, but the timing of these land seizures neatly coincides with a historic utility spending boom driven almost exclusively by the energy-guzzling demands of new AI data centers.
The financial mechanics of this alliance are grimly elegant. Because heavily regulated utilities receive guaranteed, rate-payer subsidized returns on approved infrastructure builds, the power companies are structurally incentivized to overbuild as much as possible. The AI companies get their unfathomable power requirements met without having to negotiate complex land rights on the open market, while the utilities lock in guaranteed corporate profits. The public, meanwhile, loses their land to state seizure and ultimately subsidizes the entire expansion on their monthly electrical bills (a breathtakingly cynical wealth transfer).
If you want to see the rhetorical gymnastics required to justify this arrangement, I spent part of my morning reading a Hacker News discussion reacting to the Fortune investigation. The prevailing defense from commenters bending over backward to protect the industry is a fascinating case study in techno-utopian hubris. The argument reliably distills down to the core premise that "compute is the new electricity," therefore rendering private data centers functionally equivalent to public utilities.
This argument demonstrates a profound, almost aggressive misunderstanding of why the government grants eminent domain to private corporations in the first place. The legal foundation for handing a private entity the power of state seizure rests heavily on the strict definition of a common carrier, a concept heavily codified during the 19th-century railroad expansion.
In the landmark 1872 Supreme Court case Olcott v. The Supervisors, the court affirmed that railroads could be granted the right of eminent domain specifically because they were legally required to be open to the public. Rather than seizing land for exclusive corporate use, the government mandated that the railroads serve as public highways. They were legally prohibited from arbitrarily denying service to citizens willing to pay the toll, and their operational rates were subject to intense public oversight.
Far from acting as a civic utility, a startup burning billions of venture capital dollars to ingest copyrighted material operates strictly as a private factory. Attempting to map 19th-century common carrier jurisprudence onto a closed-loop data center that gates its API behind a $20 monthly subscription just to bypass local zoning laws is a complete shitshow of legal interpretation.
The mechanical reality of the grid exposes the lie. Picture a side-by-side diagram of electrical flow. In a legitimate public grid upgrade, power flows from a generation plant through common infrastructure and distributes equitably to thousands of residential homes and public businesses. In the laundered grid upgrade currently being forced through utility commissions, power flows through a publicly seized transmission corridor directly into a single, walled-off corporate compound.
If we collectively accept the legal fiction that data center compute is interchangeable with public electricity, there is absolutely no limit to the physical infrastructure tech monopolies can demand the state seize on their behalf. Today it is a high-voltage transmission line slicing through a Maryland farm; tomorrow it is a dedicated cooling reservoir bulldozing a suburban neighborhood, or an independent substation plowing through a municipal park (assuming the executives feel the vibes are right).
The relentless expansion of AI infrastructure is exposing the hollowness of the tech industry's anti-government posturing. They despise the administrative state only when it attempts to protect the public from their products. When they need the state to forcefully appropriate physical land to feed their servers, they are more than happy to wield the heavy hand of government regulation against everyday citizens.
We do not have to accept a world where "permissionless" innovation simply means they do not need permission to take your land. State utility commissions possess the regulatory authority, right now, to classify a closed-loop server farm precisely as the private factory that it actually is. We just have to demand they enforce it.