Georgia Power Is Taking 300 Rural Homes to Power AI Data Centers

Georgia Power is moving to acquire roughly 300 rural properties under state-authorized eminent domain to build a 35-mile transmission line that will carry electricity to new AI data centers. The Brown family of Coweta County, Georgia, is one of them. The Browns chose to sell their home rather than face a forced seizure in court, according to original CBS News reporting.

The project is the Ashley Park transmission line, identified on Georgia Power's grid-projects page. Georgia Power is a for-profit, investor-owned utility regulated by the Georgia Public Service Commission, not a state agency. Utilities have used eminent domain to build transmission corridors for decades. This time the new demand is AI training and inference data centers clustered around the Atlanta region. Georgia Power has negotiated a stipulated agreement with state regulators to fund the buildout through rate base.

For the Browns, the question is whether their house should sit under the line. "It's ours. It's our family. We belong here," the family told CBS News. "To us it's theft. It's literally a billion-dollar company stealing land from smaller people, people who can't fight back. We don't have the money to fight Georgia Power."

Holly Lovett, a Georgia Power spokesperson, said the utility "has worked hard to be transparent, negotiate in good faith" and "make the process as easy as possible" for affected landowners. The utility is not building a data center on the Browns' land. It is asking them to surrender a slice of their property so high-voltage wires can pass over it, in service of a buildout the utility argues is required for grid reliability and the load growth the Georgia Public Service Commission has accepted as the planning baseline.

The Browns are one case in a corridor of roughly 300 landowners along the planned route, per local GPB reporting. Legal analysis from mrod.law frames the Ashley Park project within a broader pattern of transmission-line eminent domain use in Georgia, where utilities hold statutory authority to compel sales when voluntary negotiations fail.

A private, investor-owned utility, acting under state authority, is asking rural residential landowners to absorb the spatial cost of the AI buildout. Those landowners will not be the customers for the compute. They will not own a share of the data centers. They will live under the corridor, or they will sell. The strongest countervailing argument is real: transmission-line eminent domain is a standard tool, and the project serves broader reliability and load growth, not only AI. That does not change who has been named on the map, or that the named families are not the ones who will plug in the GPUs.