Data Center Infrastructure Is Triggering Real Legal Fights

A thread on power companies using eminent domain to seize land for power lines serving AI data centers generated skepticism about whether these facilities are actually being built. Someone called out Kevin O'Leary's Utah data center proposal as 'preposterous' and questioned whether the announced scale is real. The thread also corrected a misleading framing: it's eminent domain for power lines to data centers, not for the data centers themselves, which is a meaningful legal distinction.

Separately, Airbus moving off AWS generated a thread that immediately asked about industrial espionage, specifically whether the US government has ever accessed European industrial data through cloud providers. The comments were split between 'this is a real concern' and 'European governments do the same thing.'

The through-line: the physical and legal infrastructure around AI compute is generating friction that the industry wasn't prepared for. Eminent domain, cross-border data sovereignty, and power grid capacity are all becoming real constraints, not just talking points.