Power companies are using eminent domain to seize land for data centers as 70% of Americans say not in my backyard

The market implication is not eminent-domain doctrine itself; it is a higher-friction path to megawatt delivery. That raises the value of incumbents with existing interconnection queues, permitting teams, and right-of-way control, while penalizing greenfield data-center developers and REITs that depend on rapid campus scaling. The most immediate beneficiaries are the grid supply chain names that get paid per mile, per substation, and per upgrade, not the utilities that may ultimately absorb delay risk in rate cases.

Near term, this is a timing story rather than a demand-destruction story. Courts have historically been permissive when a project can be framed as grid reliability, so headline-driven weakness in AI power names is more likely to be a short-lived multiple compression event than a change in 6-18 month earnings power. The real inflection would be state-level legal or legislative tightening that forces more projects back through the permitting queue and materially raises capital intensity per MW.

Contrarian read: consensus may be too optimistic on frictionless transmission buildout and too pessimistic on the willingness of hyperscalers to pay up for guaranteed power. The structural winner is likely behind-the-meter generation, switchgear, and EPC exposure, not the land-heavy data-center REIT model. GETY and PFE are not useful vehicles for this theme; they are at best historical reference points, not current exposures.