As of 2026, there are over 5,400 data centers operating in the United States. That's more than the next 14 countries combined. China — the country most people assume leads — has roughly 450. The US has them beat by more than ten to one.

831 more are under construction right now.

And corporations will do whatever it takes to keep building.

We already have the proof. In Virginia, Microsoft needed land for a data center expansion. Surveyors found a Black cemetery. Regulators downplayed its significance, never contacted a single family member, and the graves were cleared. The data center sits there today. In Pittsylvania County, over 200 graves — descendants of enslaved people, families who had held that land since emancipation — were dug up and relocated to make way for a data center campus. In North Carolina, a man fighting a data center on his family's land said publicly: "Our foreparents are buried on that site. Not history in a book — real people, in the ground."

Here's how it's legal — and getting more legal every year.

There is no federal law that protects Black burial grounds on private property the same way Indigenous burial grounds are protected. The moment a cemetery gets labeled "abandoned" — and authorities have wide discretion to make that call — nearly every protection vanishes. Any cemetery, any community, any family plot sitting on land a corporation wants is vulnerable under that loophole.

Then comes the next tool: eminent domain.

Eminent domain lets the government — or a private company acting with government approval — take your land for "public use" whether you want to sell or not. It's been used for roads and schools for generations. Now it's being used for AI infrastructure.

In Georgia right now, Georgia Power is using eminent domain to seize land along a 35-mile corridor to build transmission lines that feed AI data centers. Over 330 homeowners targeted. Up to 30 homes being demolished. The Georgia Public Service Commission approved the entire plan in December 2025. Residents say they never had a real chance to fight back.

Now here's the part that should alarm everyone.

In Ohio, a business trade group is pushing to change state law to allow what they're calling "possession authority" — meaning corporations could take your land and begin construction before you've even been fully compensated. Right now the law requires payment first. They want to flip that. Once that flips, your only leverage is gone before you ever set foot in a courtroom.

This is how it happens to any cemetery:

Step 1 — Label it abandoned or minimize its significance.

Step 2 — Acquire surrounding land through eminent domain for "grid infrastructure."

Step 3 — The cemetery becomes isolated, surrounded, legally unreachable.

Step 4 — Possession authority kicks in. Construction starts before families can fight back.

Step 5 — By the time anyone responds, the land is gone.

Your grandparents' graves are not protected if a corporation decides that land serves a data center. The law as it stands — and especially as it's being rewritten — does not stop them.

Share this before it happens somewhere near you.

The truth doesn't always need a filter — it just needs someone willing to say it. — Voices Without Words

#VoicesWithoutWords #DataCenters #PossessionAuthority #KnowYourRights #CemeteryProtection— in Lake County, Indiana.

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