The Philip DeFranco Show - (BONUS) The Secret Land Grab Powering The AI Boom

Episode Date: July 24, 2026

Watch the full Daily DeFranco Show: https://www.youtube.com/@PhilipDeFranco?sub_confirmation=1 Get More News Clips: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpLB7kBu9O5dbBKhaIOmqcQ?sub_confirmation=1 Imagine you hear a knock at the door, you open it, and the person on the other side tells you they wanna buy your home. You think about it, you say no, and then they tell you they’re gonna take your property anyways.  That’s something that’s happening in the US right now — as tech companies and utilities build massive AI data centers and the infrastructure to power them — and the law is often on their side.  There are currently more than 3,000 data centers in the US – and thirty-eight percent of Americans live within five miles of one. Virginia has more than any other state. It’s home to what’s known as “Data Center Alley” — which handles roughly one-fifth of the world’s internet traffic. With places like Loudoun County bringing in tax revenue from data centers nearly equal to the county’s entire operating budget.  And — across the country — these projects have benefited from discounted electricity rates and tax breaks from state and local governments competing to attract their businesses. With Donald Trump's policies speeding up the approval process — partly by relaxing environmental regulations from clean air and water laws.  And with that, there  are at least another 1,500 data centers planned in the country — and another four percent of Americans who don’t currently live near a data center live within 5 miles of one in development. And there are more planned in Georgia than almost any other state. So Georgia Power, the largest electric utility in the state? It’s building five new methane gas  burning power plants to generate the massive amounts of power required by these data centers. Which the Southern Environmental Law Center estimated could ultimately cost customers fifty to sixty billion dollars over the life of the facilities.And Inside Climate News reported it could produce almost 14 million metric tons of CO2-equivalent annually  — upping the state’s total annual emissions by more than 13 percent.   And this is something that’s happening all across the country thanks to soaring energy demand driven by data centers. Right, in 2024, data centers already accounted for more than four percent  of the nation’s total electricity use — roughly the same as the entire country of Pakistan. ——————————     Produced by: Cory Ray, Philip DeFranco Edited by: James Girardier, Maxwell Enright, Julie Goldberg, Christian Meeks, Matthew Henry Art Department: William Crespo Writing/Research: Jared Paolino, Philip DeFranco ———————————— #USA #America #datacenters Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Just combine your car and home insurance with Bel Air Direct and save. Get a quote at bellair direct.com. Gregus believes in the art of living in choosing the pleasurable over the practical. It's why we craft our premium vodka in France using pure spring water from Jenzac. And why you hear the celebratory club of our quirk reminding us to make every Martini cocktail count. Go on and make every moment count because there's no better time than now. Gregoose, make time wait. This AI data center and electricity problem, it is getting worse and worse, and if it hasn't

impacted you directly yet, it's getting more likely that it will. And for one of the ways that we're seeing this, I want you to imagine that you hear a knock at the door. You then open it and the person on the other side says, hey, I want to buy your house. And you say, okay, I'm going to think about it. You end up saying no. And then they tell you, hey, we're going to take it anyways. Because that is what you're seeing happening in the US right now,

is you've got these tech companies and utilities building massive AI data centers and the infrastructure to power them, and the law is often on their side. If you didn't know, there are currently more than 3,000 data centers in the United States, and 38% of all Americans, they live within five miles of one. In Virginia, I mean, they have more than any other state. They're home to what's known as Data Center Halley, which handles roughly one-fifth of the world's internet traffic. And so you got places like Loudoun County bringing in tax revenue from data centers

nearly equal to the county's entire operating budget. And across the country, you've had these projects benefiting from discounted electricity rates and tax breaks from state and local governments competing to attract their businesses. And you've also had Donald Trump's policies speeding up the approval process, partly by relaxing environmental regulations from clean air and water laws. And so with that, there are at least another 1,500 data centers planned in the country. And you've got another 4% of Americans who do not currently live near a data center living within five miles of one in development. And that then brings us to Georgia because you have more planned in Georgia than almost any other state. It's a Georgia power, right?

The largest electric utility in the state, they're building five new methane gas burning power plans to generate the massive amounts of power required. by these data centers. Where would you have the Southern Environmental Law Center estimating could ultimately cost customers $50 to $60 billion over the life of the facilities? And you've also got inside climate news reporting that it could produce almost 14 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent annually, uping the state's total annual emissions by more than 13%. And this is also something that's been happening all across the country, thanks to the soaring energy demand driven by the data centers. I mean, just in 2024, you had data centers, and again, it's increasing, already accounting for more than 4% of the nation's total electricity use. Just for data centers in 2024, it was roughly the same as the same as a data centers,

the entire country of Pakistan. And again, that number, of course, has only grown since. AI-driven energy demand. It is outpacing available capacity in some parts of the country in driving up energy bills. And a very key thing, and something it's often missed when people talk about this, is that power plants are not the only infrastructure that's needed to make all of this possible. Or you also need a way to get the power where it needs to go. And you've got utility companies in the U.S. actually predicting that most of the new money that they spend in the future is going to go towards building transmission lines. Or the cost is expected to nearly double to around $50 billion a year between 2019 and 2008. But also realistically, that number could get even high.

I mean, in 2022, this is just a few years ago. Georgia Power planned to build 50 miles a new right-away high-voltage transmission across the entire state over the following 10 years. That already seemed like a decent amount, but they are now planning to build more than a thousand miles. And to do so, it's going to require getting their hands and more than 300 parcels of land. Land, including residential properties, and some reports saying that around 20 to 30 homes are expected to be fully demolished. And what you're seeing is much of that contested land? It's along a 35-mile stretch of the project through Coeta and Fayette counties. And there, you've had a young woman by the name of Ansley Brown being one of those affected.

And she has racked up millions of views on TikTok and other platforms trying to save her and her mother's home. My childhood home. My childhood home is being taken by Georgia Power. They are going to bulldoze this entire property to the ground. We don't have a choice in this. They are going to be expanding these power lines. Why? For the data centers.

All of this is for the data centers. And you may think this might not affect you personally. But what happens when they come for your house next? But in the end there, you had Brown's mom eventually reaching an agreement to sell the property reportedly only after the company threatened to acquire it through what's known as eminent domain, which is a legal process that allows private property to be taken with compensation for projects determined to serve a public purpose. Now with that, you have a Georgia power spokesperson claiming that it uses eminent domain only as a last resort and less than 1% of its land transactions.

Even another spokesperson claiming that the utility offers 125% over fair market value is their first offer. But what you have Brown and others arguing is that these are just technicalities. In the end, you've got people like her and her mom giving up their home because they just felt like they had really no other choice. telling 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. You can't tear down 35 miles a rural Georgia and it not hurt something or somebody. And to say that you're doing it in the name of data centers is a slap in the face to us, our community, our animals. And again, while we're focusing on Georgia for a number of reasons, including I just really care about Georgia, this is happening all over the place. Right in eastern Pennsylvania, you've got Amazon and other developers having so many data center projects underway that the local utility PPL, they expect peak electricity demand, to more than triple by 2030. For a year that sounds made up to me, but we're only three and a half years away from it.

And with all this, you just hear and see all the stories. Stories like a man by the name of John Zola telling PBS that has been hell ever since a contractor hired by PPL knocked on his door in late 2024 and told him, hey, there's a planned build of a 500 kilowolte power line through your property. With Zola saying, they don't look at whose lives

they are destroying, whose property they are destroying. Well, he said that the amount that they're offering him, it's gone from $17,000 to $85,000. He said that there's no amount of money that'll make himself. And he's definitely not alone there. You have another Pennsylvania and a farmer turning down $15 million for land that he'd worked for 50 years. One in Wisconsin, they declined 80 million the same month. And you've got plenty of other landowners just rejecting offers going above $120,000 per acre. Prices that for a number of these people, it would have seemed insane just a few years ago. And so that's also why you see this story framed by some saying, oh, well, I mean, look at this person who got a payday of a lifetime.

Or you've got the Wall Street Journal reporting on how a lucky few there striking it rich in the data center boom. Where stories that pop up like in Pennsylvania again, 96 families and one township collectively selling, about 1,700 acres to a single data center developer for an average of $330,000 an acre. Right, earning $5.5 million on average, with a total sale reaching almost $600 million. But then also what you're seeing are people who have been described as opportunists and middlemen making a ton of money. Last November, for example, you had an investor reportedly paying $615 million for less than 100 acres in Northern Virginia. Property that the seller had bought for just less than a tenth of the price just four years prior.

And then back in Georgia, you got a local developer making a monster profit by flipping land that he bought for $4 million a year earlier. to Amazon for $270 million. But for those who end up holding under their hand, no matter what is thrown at them, they may eventually be left with no choice. Right, and actually, while the federal government, they have the authority to invoke eminent domain,

most cases are handled by state and local governments. And what you have is that state and local governments, depending on state and local laws, can also delegate this power to private entities or so-called common carriers like utilities companies. And the ultimate legal basis for all this is what's known as the takings clause of the Fifth Amendment of the US Constitution,

right, which says that private property shall not be taken for public use without just compensation. Or in other words, if the owner is paid a fair price, their land can be taken as long as it serves the public interest. But that, it raises at least two questions. One, what counts as fair payment and two, what counts as public use? And so when it comes to payment, it's usually based in some way on the assessed or market value. And while there are technicalities that I'm not going to really get into here, as we've seen for some people, there's really no such thing as a fair price.

And then, when it comes to what counts as public use, you have the Supreme Court for its part interpreting the concept broadly. In 2005, for example, it ruled that economic development qualified as public use. which is a decision that you saw give Pfizer, one of the world's biggest pharmaceutical companies, the green light to take homes around its facility in New London, Connecticut. Though also, at the end, they never developed that land, and they just left the city entirely.

But also what you saw is that Supreme Court decision actually having another big impact. It also led 45 states to change their laws around eminent domain in the years that followed. You have an expert who actually wrote a whole book on the court's ruling, claiming in an op-ed back in 2015. No other Supreme Court decision in all of American history has generated so much state legislation.

Though you also had him arguing that in more than half the states that had enacted reform, the new legislation only pretended to restrict the use of eminent domain on the basis of economic development. But in any case, right, lawsuits challenging the seizure of property for transmission lines on the basis of public use grounds, it's produced mixed results. Decades ago, for example, you had the Mississippi Supreme Court saying a power company could not claim eminent domain because the transmission line that it was building would pass through the state and into Louisiana without benefiting any Mississippi customers. However, you've had the Supreme Courts of South Dakota and Vermont, each upholding controversial seizures by power companies by including that providing at least some energy and improved power

reliability to in-state customers were valid public uses. And one of the difficulties is that utilities, they don't have to actually make the economic development argument, where you have them arguing that any new transmission line, even those built mainly to serve large customers like data centers or industrial facilities, that benefits everyone by improving the grid. And actually, you had one of the Georgia Power spokespeople telling the New York Times. This infrastructure is actually benefiting all the surrounding communities. It will make anything through a storm and day-to-day more resilient, more reliable, because

of these large load users coming to our state. But also, here's the thing with that, by Georgia Power's own estimates. Only 20 to 30% of the power on the new line will serve the state's growing residential and commercial demand. And the rest, right, the vast majority, that's gonna serve data centers. So then also a big thing here is we don't actually know which ones.

Often, even the people selling or getting offers for their land, they don't know. Or Georgia Power, they've declined to name which specific companies the data centers on this line belong to, citing safety and security. And this has actually become standard operating procedure in the industry. where you've got major tech companies launching these huge projects across the country asking land sellers and public officials to sign

NDAs in exchange for limited information and the hope that the project will ultimately pay off for them or their communities in some way. Last year, for example, you had NBC News looking at over 30 data center proposals across 14 states and finding that in a majority of cases, local officials signed NDAs and worked with what appeared to be shell companies meant to keep the actual developers hidden. You had five elected officials in different counties saying that the agreements barred them from sharing information with their constituents. And so that's why you've got people like the head of state and local policy at a nonprofit called the American Economic Liberties Project saying that violates a very fundamental norm of democracy, which is that they are answerable first to the voters and to their constituents not to some secret corporation that they're cutting deals with in the back room. Though I will say one of the things that is clear is that this matters to a lot of people across the aisle. Or you've got polling showing that seven in ten Americans oppose the construction of AI data centers in their communities, including a majority of both Democrats and Republicans.

And when you look at running for or holding public office, you similarly see that this is not an issue that falls neatly along partisan lines. Right on both sides, actually, you have people who you might describe as corporate or establishment and tending to be more supportive to data center development. Well, then further from the middle and in fact on both left and right, you have what's been described I would say is more populous who have been campaigning hard against this. And in fact, a recent Bloomberg analysis found that since December, at least 25 people running for governor or a federal office have run ads either promoting their own opposition to data centers or slamming their opponent for

supporting them. And again, that number is just about evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. And it also might prove to be a winning strategy. You had Anzley Brown, right? That young woman from Georgia who spoke out about eminent domain being used to build power lines in her backyard saying in an interview with Marjorie Taylor Green, of all people. Almost all of our commissioners are Republican, city council, everybody, Republicans. But that is about to change. Our biggest support right now where everybody's headed is to vote for a Democrat for a Cowdydy County Commissioner for the first time in a long time. And when you used to drive up these country roads, there were Trump sons everywhere.

I mean, they were stapled to trees, they were on power poles, they were in people's front yards everywhere. Those signs are gone. There is not a Trump sign in this county anymore that I know of because people have shifted. They feel betrayed by the Republican Party, which, how could you not? I mean, we voted for you and you're doing this to us. Well, while it might be, you know, Republicans that take the fall for data centers somewhere else, it could also be Democrats. Whether you're on the left or the right, eminent domain, it was designed to build highways and hospitals. for the community or at least utilities that are actually for the people.

And yet, there are sure to be benefits from these builds and to the data centers, but private companies striking secret deals with elected officials, sending people to knock on your door and pressure you into selling your home. Creating a situation threatening to bring the government down on you, if you refuse all without telling you who they are? That doesn't really seem to be focused on benefiting the people, but rather the billionaires and the politicians who are owned by them. And so, hey, with all of this, I gotta ask you, what are your thoughts?

Because this isn't a pure black and white situation, it's not a left versus right situation, I understand that there is nuance to a number of the things here. So that's why I'd love to hear from you, no matter where you land on this. And in the meantime, I'd love if you hit this video with a like, if you liked this kind of extra dive into a big news piece. Of course, this video is actually in addition to regular Philip DeFranco show that you can watch right now. Another Epstein associate, a person who might have had answers about Jeffrey Epstein's trafficking network has suddenly died right in the middle of an investigation. You've also got new brutal details and allegations from prosecutors in the David case. And why you're seeing drastically different reactions right now around a man who was killed by Wisconsin police.

I love yo faces and I'll see you next time.