alt Hacker NewsWhen can a power company take your land for data center infrastructure?
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This could work out. We need, for example, ultra-high-voltage DC lines from the US wind belt to areas with real loads. The US wind belt is roughly from the Texas panhandle north to Canada. Plenty of wind, no big power users. But nobody has been able to build lines west to California or east to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan, where the loads are. This is held up by land acquisition, not technology.
China has something of the same problem. The cheap power sources are in the northwest, and the big loads are in the southeast. So China has long million-volt UHV DC lines.
Misleading title: they are using eminent domain to seize land for power lines to data centers. (emphasis mine)
This is still quite debatable, but so much less so than the implied accusation that they would somehow sell out their privileges as subcontractors for the data centers themselves.
i definitely have internal debates on the idea of eminent domain and the nuances of wether i think its ok or not.
that said, i think i lean to it’s absolutely not ok to use eminent domain when the receivers of the benefits of the taken property are primarily one private industry and its owners.
i’d probably more often be ok with it if the benefits were mostly limited to being widely distributed to the people of that locality/region.
even then i go back and forth but i know for sure that plays a major part in how i see it.
That seems perfectly reasonable. Eminent domain for power lines is about the most reasonable use of the tool. This kind of thing is what it’s there for.
Notice how when it comes to the interests of Capital, suddenly regulations or NIMBYs are rendered powerless. Building homes and infrastructure? Impossible. Building datacenters that will be obsolete in 4 years and abandoned just to fuel a speculation bubble? Yessir! Immediately, sir!
Opposition to eminent domain would be a lot less if the government had to pay say 10x market value.
flagged per the highly misleading title
The irony of this article that was originally posted completely free on The Conversation being stuck behind a Fortune paywall is a bit much.
https://theconversation.com/when-can-a-power-company-take-yo...
Are these AI-driven data centers actually getting built? I was reading about Kevin O’Leary’s initial proposal for his Utah data center and it’s just preposterous, it’s inconceivable anyone needs that much compute at any realistic demand level. The ask is so massively large that even the scaled down version is just absurd.
We also have the Stargate UK data center that the Starmer government trumpeted before it was exposed as a glorified PR stunt without any substance. [1]
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/jul/04/openai-ap...
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I am all for Communism and giving more priority to projects that help all society. But this is not it.
It would help if the power grid was public property, thou. It would help if the power grid was build so the majority of citizens profit. It would help if the power grid was build for someone else than big tech.
Meanwhile building railroads is impossible. Could we convince AI companies to build their datacenters on trains? USA would have in a few years the largest train network in the world.
A few alternative sources
https://fortune.com/2026/07/19/data-center-eminent-domain-pu...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/when-can-a-power-compan...
https://theaicronicle.com/en/news/policy/data-center-eminent...
Last one appears to be generated using AI, with no attribution to the original author