Across the U.S., communities are grappling with the rise of AI data centers.

Tom Uttechhas lived on his 52-acre property in Saukville, Wisconsin, for nearly 40 years.

From outside Uttech's home art studio, the landscape is filled with rolling hills, topped with wildflowers that build to the highest point in the township, where rows of evergreens that Uttech says he planted by hand in 1988 have since grown into mature trees.

"That kind of scares me because I didn't think I was that old," Uttech said of the trees that he's watched grow over the decades.

The 83-year-old renowned landscape painter, whose work has been displayed at museums across the country, has spent hundreds of hours and years of work over the last few decades maintaining and curating his land into a sweeping prairie that has come to serve as the inspiration for his work and his livelihood.

It's a lifetime of work that Uttech now says has come under threat after receiving a letter in the mail from his utility company informing him that a massive power line would need to be built through his property, undoing years of work and stripping away the muse for his art.

"I couldn't believe it, and I still don't," Uttech told ABC News correspondent Elizabeth Schulze when asked what his initial reaction was to the news. "They'd be putting power lines that are 300 or something feet tall, taller than apparently the Statue of Liberty."

Uttech later learned that the transmission line would be used to help power a massive $15 billion datacenter campus that's set to be built on over 500 football fields' worth of farmland in nearby in Port Washington -- a signature part of the Trump administration's $500 billionStargate partnershipwith OpenAI and Oracle, which President Donald Trump hopes will help supercharge the artificial intelligencerevolution.

Uttech is facing what other residents in his town -- and others around the country -- are facing more and more: the risk of losing parts of his land to eminent domain, the government's legal authority to seize private property for public use, in support of the growing expansion ofAI data centersas the demand to power them continues to grow.

The threat, in some ways, is a physical manifestation of what many people like Uttech fear theartificial intelligenceboom could mean for their work.

Source: Drudge Report