In Cat Kemmerling’s dream, she and her husband Rob are sitting in their pickup truck on a cliff on their West Virginia farm, overlooking the Shenandoah River. The truck is falling backwards over the edge, into the abyss below.

An Army engineer who helped dismantle IEDs in Iraq and lives with PTSD, Kemmerling says her old nightmares returned this summer after an organization she had never heard of, calling itself Valley Link, mailed an anodyne flyer announcing plans for a high-voltage transmission line through the heart of the 70-acre farm she and Rob bought in 2018 as a retirement sanctuary.

The proposed development is one of several major power line projects in the works to address a steep power shortage in Northern Virginia, home to the world’s largest concentrations of data centers.

A 765-kilovolt line with a right-of-way the width of a sixteen-lane highway, the Valley Link project would string together 260 miles of 160-foot towers, stretching across three states— from West Virginia to Virginia and into Maryland. Another Valley Link project would cover 116 miles from rural central Virginia into Northern Virginia. Together, the new lines could extend across dozens of counties home to more than 1.5 million people, and yet advocates, legal experts and even their own government representatives say residents are virtually powerless to stop it.

“Overnight, my property has become worthless,” Kemmerling said. She felt helpless, like whatever sense of safety and peace they had found here is now in jeopardy. And she felt angry — because the power these massive lines will carry won’t stay in her community.

It will go primarily to Loudoun County, Virginia, to fuel data centers. “We are becoming the extension cord for Loudoun County,” Kemmerling said. “We do not benefit at all from this.”Amidst the AI boom across the US, Loudoun County, home to some 230 data centers spanning more than 56 million square feet, has become something of a cautionary tale.

Nearly two decades after officials there welcomed data centers for their ample tax revenue, the country’s now-soaring electricity needs are driving proposals for enormous transmission lines through communities hundreds of miles away — places that opponents say get no tangible benefit from data centers but are losing land to power them.

Bipartisan opposition to data centers has emerged as a key midterm issue, with more than 8 in 10 Americans expressing far more concern than excitement about the rapid development of Artificial Intelligence, according to recent CNN polling. But while the national fight has centered on the development of data centers themselves, Loudoun’s experience exposes a less examined race to build the infrastructure needed to power them — including the thousands of miles of high-voltage lines all over the country.

Those lines are often built under threat of eminent domain, which allows the state government to seize private property for a project that is seen as being in the public interest.

Opponents of the status quo say that has effectively cast privately-owned data centers as critical infrastructure, with the government’s compulsory power marshaled on their behalf — before the American public has agreed they want them. “Eminent domain is being exercised on behalf of not public industry, but private industry,” said Democratic Virginia Sen. Russet Perry.

“That is not something that has historically been done.”A recent economic study from Brookings estimated that the data center build out will “double the electricity consumption of the entire US residential sector” by 2032 — power demand that “requires dedicated substations, high-voltage connections, and significant grid-interconnection investment.”Whether the AI boom can expand at its current breakneck pace may hinge on fights like the one unfolding over Valley Link.

The projects pose a consequential question: Can communities with no data centers of their own block the transmission lines needed to power facilities hundreds of miles away? If they can — a long shot — rural communities may hold one of the few checks on an industry whose electricity demands have otherwise outpaced the laws and institutions governing the grid.

If they can’t, private property owners in communities across the country could be condemned to sustain a buildout approved elsewhere.

As Kemmerling points out, although she will be compensated for the raw acreage that the power conglomerate places under easement, it won’t account for the total loss in her property value once it’s been bisected by a massive, humming power line.

The outrage has even found expression in a bluegrass protest song, “Shame on You Valley Link,” recorded anonymously by a Virginian bluegrass musician. “While the board rooms in Richmond count the kilowatts, we’re left the scars and our broken hearts,” he sings. “For the tech men’s cloud and their hungry machines are stealing the only home we ever had.”

The song was released on Spotify and can be streamed, thanks to data centers. Across Virginia and West Virginia, an ad hoc assortment of grassroots organizations have emerged to oppose the power lines, marshalling public comment to the regional transmission organizations overseeing the projects and the state regulatory boards in each state responsible for approving or denying them. Town councils and county commissions have adopted resolutions formally opposing the development; some have set aside budgets of hundreds of thousands of dollars and hired outside counsel explicitly to fight it.

Even in Loudoun County, there is massive local resistance. In the rural west of the county, where monopole distribution lines flank dirt roads, leaning this way and that like crooked teeth, bright-red “NO NEW LINES IN LOUDOUN” signs have sprung up in front of small farms and homes that normally sport opposing political signage.

A late-August listening session for the Valley Link project in western Loudoun was standing room only. Babies bounced on hips and FARM USE license plate tags dotted the gravel parking lot, packed bumper-to-bumper. Of dozens of sometimes-tearful public comments made, not a single person spoke in support of the project. Many made the explicit link between the transmission lines and data centers.

“It is an injustice to industrialize our rural landscape to subsidize commercial data center growth elsewhere,” one speaker said.

Community backlash has in the past pushed proposed power lines to move or killed them outright. One county on the northwest edge of Virginia, Clarke County, hired former state attorney general and counsel to former Vice President Mike Pence, Richard Cullen, and was able to score a localized win: Updated project maps from Valley Link now touch only a small tip of the county.

A spokesperson for Valley Link told CNN that the group has gone “parcel by parcel” and “spent months in the communities along these routes, walking properties and talking to thousands of residents to avoid sensitive areas that aren’t publicly mapped, places like family cemeteries, local historic sites and active farming operations.”

But, the spokesperson said, “No line of this size is built without impacts on people or communities.”And there are few official ways for local communities to veto their development — in part because under Virginia state law, the power provider must provide power to all customers. The power has to come from somewhere.

Technically, the two lines have yet to be approved by state regulatory authorities. The regional transmission organization, PJM, one of seven nonprofits across the country that manage the flow of electricity across their regions, selected the proposed routes by Valley Link and a second major 500-kilovolt transmission line planned for the region, known as the MARL project, from a series of bids. Each state must now approve the routes.

But the Virginia authority, the State Corporation Commission, is historically deferential to power operators’ assessments of what’s needed for transmission, according to analysts and lobbyists who spoke to CNN, because one of its primary mandates is to ensure grid reliability.

There have already been alarming signals about its vulnerability: During a heat wave in July, a piece of equipment on one of the high-voltage lines serving Northern Virginia’s so-called Data Center Alley failed. Several data centers switched to backup power, disconnecting 3,000 megawatts of power from the grid — a sudden drop in demand so significant that it caused electricity to flicker from Chicago to Miami. It is possible that state legislatures could intervene to force the state regulators to put more constraints on the developers.

The Virginia state house could pass a statute instructing the SCC to consider alternative routes or underground options — an expensive and logistically challenging possibility that some residents have pushed for but which Valley Linkargues isn’t feasible in this case.

In West Virginia, at least one state delegate candidate, Democrat Jenny Thacker, is actively campaigning on a bid to change the structure of the state regulatory board to make it more responsive to voters.

It’s also possible that the regulator, the Public Service Commission, could reject either project. A government engineer in West Virginia has already recommended that the commission deny the MARL application because it provided “no” benefits to West Virginians. But whether that would kill the project is unclear, said Michael Barber, an infrastructure policy analyst with the Piedmont Environmental Council of Virginia, which opposes the lines. PJM could challenge the decision in court, and case law is too new in this area to make any predictions about the outcome.

And that would still not solve the problem of grid reliability if, in the next state over, a huge mass of data centers continues to draw power.

“Ultimately, the job of the commission is to ensure reliability,” said Dan Holmes, a longtime Virginia lobbyist on behalf of environmental and clean energy advocates. “When push comes to shove, I think we’re going to see approvals.”The power shortfall in Loudoun is already driving some data centers to other markets, said Aaron Tinjum at the Data Center Coalition.

“Constraints in Loudoun County have contributed to a shift in data center development to other parts of Virginia and to fast-growing markets like Georgia,” Tinjum said.

In Ohio, PJM has already solicited bids and accepted a proposal for four new 765-kilovolt transmission lines to fuel the demand there.

Loudoun began courting data centers nearly two decades ago because it had abundant fiberoptic infrastructure and the facilities promised enormous tax revenue without adding schoolchildren or commuter traffic. Today, data centers now supply almost 40% of the county’s tax revenue, helping fund schools and community centers while keeping property tax growth low compared to surrounding areas.

What officials failed to anticipate was the scale and speed of the growth in power demand. According to Mike Turner, the vice chairman of the Loudoun County Board since 2025, a perfect storm of unpredictable shifts took place in 2022: the social migration to digital spaces like Zoom during the pandemic proved enduring, the dominant state power provider dramatically underestimated electricity demand in its projections, and ChatGPT hit the streets.

Loudoun’s energy use grew 233 percent from 2021 to 2025, to more than 5 gigawatts. According to a recent study by Turner, the county could “easily require as much as 20-30 [gigawatts] of power due to AI demands” by 2030.

“Nobody could have anticipated that. It was a historic tectonic shift,” Turner told CNN.

Some data centers that have already been approved and built in the area are now facing wait times of a year or more to be hooked up to the grid because there isn’t enough power, according to Tinjum. Even the power carried by Valley Link and MARL may not be enough.

Analysts say there is no analogous parallel for the power needs of a single private industry forcing the kind of land seizures under threat of eminent domain that northern Virginia’s data centers are now auguring.

“The complex regulatory patchwork that stitches the grid together wasn’t designed for a situation like this, where a locality can permit something that suddenly, 18 months later, you have the amount of demand in one spot on the grid that could have been an entire city that organically emerged over 100 years,” said Barber.

The clash has opened an intense debate over who should control data center siting — and who should bear the costs. The governor of New York has issued an outright moratorium on data centers, as some in Virginia, like Perry, are now calling for.

Virginia Gov. Abigail Spanberger has resisted calls for a state-wide moratorium. Loudoun is considering revoking some grandfathered approvals, while some county leaders want authority to reject projects that exceed available power capacity. West Virginia has moved in the opposite direction, stripping local governments of authority.

Federal regulators, meanwhile, have ordered national reliability officials to develop criteria for connecting large computational loads to the bulk power system by the end of 2026, but those rules have not yet been set.

Industry advocates say data centers are how the modern internet functions. Although a growing number are training AI models — which consumes exponentially more power than other functions — many existing facilities provide cloud storage for critical functions like healthcare data and online banking, not to mention video and music streaming. President Donald Trump has said they will augur economic growth “bigger than the Industrial Revolution.”

No matter what ambivalence Americans may express in survey data, consumer demand for the services they provide isn’t slowing. About half of US adults now report using AI chatbots, according to recent Pew data. The Data Center Coalition, the main trade association for data centers, often cites research findings that the average American household has 21 connected devices; Pew research finds that a third of Americans have at least one smart device that runs using AI in their home.

And it has become increasingly common to see AI-generated images on social media opposing data centers and new transmission line projects.

For people like Kimmerling, it’s a familiar tale for rural America: an extractive industry carries valuable resources out of the hills and into wealthier communities closer to the coast, leaving little but scars behind.

“Here we are, fighting for our own rights on our own property,” Kemmerling said as her service dog laid his chin on her thigh. “We fought for you. Who’s fighting for us?”Nearby, pigs grazed, chickens scratched at the earth and the Shenandoah River whispered below — the sanctuary she and her husband fear a transmission line will permanently divide.