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WA homeowners, farmers say their land is being stolen for data centers
May 13, 2026 Updated Wed., May 13, 2026 at 5:13 p.m.

GRANT COUNTY – On a warm Tuesday evening last week, Felicitas Quintero made dinner on the grill while her husband played soccer with their kids. Every day after work, the family gathers on the front lawn – their watering hole. Now, she’s fighting to keep it. “It’s the place we find peace,” Quintero said. “Why do we have to give that up?”
Grant County Public Utility District has filed lawsuits to take part of Quintero’s property along with portions of eight other homes and farms in order to build electric transmission lines – part of a quarter billion dollar project to move more power to Quincy, a town that has become the state’s de facto data center hub. Data centers are demanding more energy than ever to fuel artificial intelligence, and the utility is not only running out of locally sourced electricity but also power-line capacity. To build more, the PUD considered running lines through public lands, protected habitats, farms or people’s homes. In the end, the utility concluded it would be fastest to take private property. Time is precious, as the utility stands to make millions potentially every month the new lines are up, officials said. But it’s trying to buy the land it needs to do that at a fraction of its value. Property owners say the utility’s actions amount to theft, and are asking a judge to throw out the condemnation cases, which are awaiting a decision. They say the lines will make it more difficult to farm their land and are worried the high voltage will interfere with electronics keeping them alive.

Chuck Allen, a spokesperson for the PUD, declined an interview but wrote in an email the nonprofit utility is required to serve growth approved by local governments and that the money it makes from transmission lines will help subsidize rates for locals. And he said the utility is paying less than full market value because it’s not taking ownership of the land; it’s just using it, indefinitely.
What’s happening to Quintero and her neighbors in Grant County is likely only the beginning. Thousands of miles of electrical lines need to be built across the Western U.S. to keep up with energy demands. And they’ll need to cut through land owned by somebody.

Data centers
Grant County PUD set limits on the amount of electricity data centers could use last year because of how fast they were growing. Microsoft alone owns 21 data center buildings in Quincy. Companies Sabey, Vantage, Cyrus One, NTT Data, Hyscale and H5 also operate campuses clustered there. Data centers accounted for 37% of the electricity used in Grant County last year, according to the utility. Utility staff warned last year data center growth fueled by the rise of AI could soon increase the risk of outages and voltage instability across the grid, so the organization capped the facilities’ power use. But billions of dollars are on the line as technology companies race to meet AI demand, and Grant County PUD is feeling the heat. Utility staff reported last year that conversations with their large customers were quickly becoming challenging. The primary bottleneck isn’t a lack of electricity (even with local hydropower running out, the utility can buy more from other places) – it’s the ability to move it where it needs to go. Transmission lines can only carry so much electricity, and the ones bringing power to Quincy are pretty much maxed out. The utility saw this coming. In 2019, they started working on the Quincy Transmission Expansion Plan, which would add six new transmission lines at a cost of about $260 million. Microsoft, the largest data center operator in Quincy by far, has committed more than $2.6 million to the project, court records show. Once completed, the utility says it will double the amount of power that can be brought into Quincy – from 372 megawatts to 750.
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