The real cost of AI agents: demolished homes, rising power bills, and a $145 billion spending spree

Georgia Power is using eminent domain to seize more than 330 properties across Coweta and Fayette counties to build a 35-mile transmission line for its Project Wansley expansion. Between 20 and 30 homes will be demolished to make way for the power corridor. Roughly 80 percent of the new generating capacity the utility is adding will serve data centres, according to Fortune.

The $16 billion grid expansion is one of the largest in Georgia’s history, driven almost entirely by the electricity demands of artificial intelligence. Two days before the demolition plans drew national attention, Mark Zuckerberg predicted on Meta’s earnings call that within five years, billions of people would each have a personal AI agent handling their finances, health, and relationships.

The infrastructure required to deliver that promise is already reshaping the lives of people who will likely never use an AI agent. Residents in the transmission line’s path told Fortune that Georgia Power’s compensation offers ran roughly $100,000 below their properties’ market value. The utility has said condemnation represents less than one percent of its total land acquisitions.

Meta’s own balance sheet reveals the scale of the bet. The company posted revenue of nearly $61 billion in the second quarter of 2026, up 28 percent year over year, but its free cash flow collapsed 91 percent to $784 million as capital expenditure surged. Meta has guided investors toward total spending of $130 billion to $145 billion this year, most of it on AI infrastructure.

The costs are not confined to one utility’s service area. Data centre protests have spread to 42 US states, with more than 140 rallies in a single day of action coordinated by a coalition that cuts across political lines. Community pressure has blocked or delayed tens of billions of dollars in planned construction.

Power bills are climbing sharply in factory towns that have nothing to do with AI. In the PJM grid region, which runs from New Jersey to Illinois, capacity charges jumped more than tenfold in a single auction cycle, driven largely by data centre demand. Industrial electricity prices rose 31 percent in Pennsylvania and 26 percent in Ohio in one year, against a seven percent national average.

Zuckerberg’s pitch is that the pain is temporary and the payoff transformative. He envisions AI agents that book appointments, manage household budgets, and negotiate on behalf of their users, a layer of intelligence accessible to everyone with a phone. Meta already runs AI agents for more than a million business users on WhatsApp and Messenger.

But Meta’s own track record complicates the forecast. The company’s Reality Labs division has lost roughly $88 billion since 2021 on a metaverse bet that has yet to produce a mass-market product. Its stock fell nearly ten percent after the Q2 results, a sign that investors are more moved by collapsing cash flow than by the promise of an agent in every pocket.

The harder question is whether the human costs of building AI infrastructure can be justified by a product that does not yet exist at scale. No personal AI agent currently on the market can reliably manage a household budget, let alone the full spectrum of daily life that Zuckerberg described. The gap between the vision and the present capability is wide.

For the families in Coweta County facing demolition orders, the promise of a personal AI agent in five years is abstract at best. What is concrete is a 500-kilovolt power line cutting through their properties so that data centres can train the models that might, eventually, produce something useful for ordinary people. Whether that trade-off is worth making is a question the industry has not yet been forced to answer.