AI Data Centers Seize American Land, Power, Privacy
Big Tech seizes American land and power through shell companies, eminent domain, and taxpayer subsidies while communities face energy cuts, soaring rents, and suppressed oversight — all for facilities that deliver few jobs and unprecedented surveillance capacity.
Nearly 50,000 Lake Tahoe residents will lose three-quarters of their power supply next year so a Nevada utility can feed electricity to data centers. The crisis exposes an aggressive campaign of corporate-state partnership: Big Tech deploys shell companies to secretly acquire land, invokes eminent domain to seize property, extracts billions in taxpayer subsidies, and builds the physical infrastructure of mass surveillance — all without a democratic mandate or meaningful accountability.
NV Energy will stop providing 75 percent of Liberty Utilities' power after May 2027, citing data-center demand in the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center. Data centers consumed 22 percent of Nevada's electricity in 2024 and are projected to reach 35 percent by 2030. California regulators hold no jurisdiction over the Nevada utility, leaving Lake Tahoe residents with two disastrous options: wait years for new transmission lines or buy power at triple current rates.
"It's like we don't exist," North Lake Tahoe resident Danielle Hughes told Fortune.
The pattern repeats nationwide despite overwhelming public opposition. A Gallup poll published May 13 found 71 percent of Americans oppose data centers in their area, with 48 percent strongly opposed. That resistance exceeds even opposition to nuclear power plants, which peaked at 63 percent since 2001. Yet at least 48 data center projects with $156 billion in investment were blocked or delayed by local opposition in 2025 alone, according to Data Center Watch.
From power grids, the pressure extends to private property. Georgia Power plans to use eminent domain if necessary to acquire land and easements for transmission lines affecting more than 330 private properties, serving Project Sail — an 829-acre hyperscale data center campus in Coweta County, Georgia.
"This is my childhood home behind me," homeowner Ansley Brown said in a video. "It is being taken by force by Georgia Power."
In Kentucky, farming family Delsia Bare and Ida Huddleston rejected a $26 million offer for roughly 900 acres. "The heartbreak that it could be gone is the first thing I feel," Bare told FOX19. "Literally a pain in the chest right there where the heart's at."
Deception compounds coercion. Big Tech routinely uses shell companies to acquire land before owners realize who the true buyer is. The Washington Post reported in 2019 that Google established Delaware company Jetstream LLC to secretly negotiate land purchases for data centers. Business Insider's 2025 investigation traced a massive data center near Columbus, Ohio — permitted under the name Magellan Enterprises LLC with 164 emergency generators — back to Google through SEC filings. Nineteen permits across 10 states have generator capacity information fully or partially redacted under trade secrets claims, with 12 held by Google.
The corporate-state partnership extends to massive public wealth transfers. Louisiana handed Meta's Hyperion data center $3.3 billion in tax breaks, exempting the company from state and local sales and use taxes on roughly $35 billion in equipment over 20 years, according to a Sherwood News analysis cited by Fortune. That figure equals Louisiana's entire state police budget for more than seven years.
Richland Parish commissioners approved the tax breaks, which routed to Laidley LLC, a Delaware-registered affiliate of Meta. At least 36 states now provide tax breaks for data centers. Virginia dishes out $1.9 billion annually, Georgia $2.6 billion, and Texas increased from $150 million in 2024 to more than $1 billion annually — a 567 percent increase.
The economic justification for these subsidies — job creation — fails to materialize. In Abilene, Texas, more than 6,000 construction workers build OpenAI's first Stargate facility. Once operational, the facility will employ at least 57 full-time workers at an average salary of $57,600, per Bloomberg documents seen by Gizmodo. Abilene gives Stargate an 85 percent property tax discount for 20 years.
Meta's Hyperion in Richland Parish promised more than 5,000 construction jobs and 500 operational roles. Tax Assessor Emmett "Lee" Brown confirmed rents increased from $600-$700 to $2,500 monthly, pricing out long-term residents.
"When Meta came in, they moved some of the folks out and put in the trailer parks," said 81-year-old Joyce Piercy. "Well, they had to find a place to go and some of them couldn't afford that."
Democratic oversight faces active suppression, not mere neglect. At least 50 Louisiana elected officials signed NDAs with the state's economic development agency under Gov. Jeff Landry, according to WWNO/Type Investigations. Not a single official signed one under former Gov. John Bel Edwards.
"They don't want the little people to know what they're doing until after they've done it," State Rep. Danny McCormick told WWNO.
The Louisiana Public Service Commission voted 4-1 in April to fast-track seven additional gas power plants for Meta's second data center in Richland Parish, bypassing competitive bidding. District 3 Commissioner Davante Lewis cast the sole dissenting vote.
The deepest problem rarely surfaces in public debate. These facilities constitute the physical backbone of an unprecedented surveillance apparatus. Google and Meta already hold enough data on hundreds of millions of Americans to reconstruct political views, daily movements, health conditions, relationships and psychological vulnerabilities.
A well-trained AI does not merely store that data. It draws inferences, predicts behavior, and can tell authorities not just what citizens did, but what they likely will do next. The 1,240 data centers tracked by Business Insider run around the clock with little public transparency and no single regulator to answer to them.
Bill Gates, who for years called climate change an existential threat that would make life "essentially unlivable at the equator," published a memo in October 2025 declaring that climate change "will not lead to humanity's demise" and that "human welfare" should be the priority over emissions reduction. That phrase — human welfare — is the standard for eminent domain. The government invokes it to justify seizing private property for the public good.
The data center buildout advances at speed, under shell company cover, with the coercive force of eminent domain as a backstop. Residents from Nevada to Georgia to Kentucky learn the same lesson: when Big Tech wants what you have, the system works for them.