AI Data Centers Need Power. Power Companies Can Now Seize Your Land for It.

The fight is happening in Maryland, not Virginia. A 76-mile transmission line is planned to cross Maryland farmland and residential parcels to carry more electricity to the cluster of AI data centers in Northern Virginia that the industry calls the "data center capital of the world." Landowners along the route are organizing in opposition, and the case is now testing a legal carve-out the post-Kelo reform wave left intact: when private developers lost eminent domain in 2005, power companies kept theirs.

That carve-out is now pulling residential land into the AI buildout.

In 2005, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Kelo v. City of New London that Connecticut could seize homes for a private development anchored by a Pfizer facility. The project never broke ground. Within a decade, 45 states passed reforms limiting eminent domain for private economic development, closing the door Kelo opened.

The reforms did not touch common carriers, the legal category that includes utilities, water providers, and pipelines. States can still delegate the power of condemnation to those entities, and they keep that authority whether or not the end user of the power is a private company.

University of Dayton law professor Aaron Walayat's July 2026 analysis for The Conversation maps the precedent split. The South Dakota Supreme Court and the Vermont Supreme Court have both backed utility seizures of land for transmission lines that primarily serve out-of-state customers, as long as the line delivers some benefit to in-state ratepayers. In 1984, the Mississippi Supreme Court went the other way and denied a cross-state line because Mississippi customers would see no benefit.

The Maryland corridor sits closest to that fault line. The electricity the 76-mile line would carry is destined for AI data centers in Loudoun County, Virginia, not for Maryland ratepayers. The Washington Post covered the landowner opposition on July 16, 2026, and CBS News has separately reported on Georgia Power's parallel effort to secure delegated eminent domain for transmission corridors serving AI campuses under construction across the state.

NextEra Energy Transmission's Mid-Atlantic Resiliency Link is the named utility project advancing alongside the Maryland line. The corridor crosses Pennsylvania and Maryland, and WESA, Pittsburgh's NPR affiliate, documented the landowner pushback in April 2026. A June 2026 analysis from the law firm MROD lays out how a utility condemnation under Georgia law would proceed and which procedural steps give landowners leverage.

This is a legal trend, not a wave of completed takings. The Maryland line is reported as planned and opposed, not built. The Georgia effort is before regulators. None of the cases have produced a finalized taking of a named residential parcel, and the South Dakota/Vermont vs. Mississippi split has not been resolved at the federal level.

The capital flow runs one direction. An independent analysis at TFTC names the underlying mechanic: AI capital expenditure is pushing utilities to invoke delegated eminent domain against residential landowners, and the financing incentives flow downhill from the data center operator to the rate base the utility recovers costs from.

If a transmission line proposal crosses your county in the next 12 months, the question to ask is whether the line delivers a measurable benefit to in-state ratepayers or whether the primary beneficiary is a data center campus in another state. The 1984 Mississippi precedent says that distinction is decisive. The South Dakota and Vermont precedents say it is not.

The Maryland 76-mile line and the Georgia Public Service Commission docket are the next places that distinction gets argued out.