Kentucky Family Turns Down $26 Million Offer to Convert Farmland Into AI Data Center

Meet the 82-year-old Kentucky grandma who turned down $26 million to turn her farm into a data center: 'I don't need your money' | Fortune

Ida Huddleston has lived on the same stretch of farmland outside Maysville, Kentucky, since she was 16. She and her late husband built a log home there, raised children, and worked the soil through six decades of marriage. Today, the family owns roughly 1,200 acres, and multiple generations still live on it. Last spring, an unnamed company described only as a major artificial intelligence firm came looking for a piece of it, according to WKRC Local 12. The company approached dozens of landowners in Mason County about buying roughly half of the Huddleston family's property for a proposed data center campus. Huddleston, 82, was offered about $60,000 an acre for her 71 acres, over $4 million. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, 54, was offered $48,000 an acre for her 463 acres, putting her potential payout above $22 million. Combined, the family's offer topped $26 million, well above the roughly $6,000-an-acre going rate for farmland in the county. Bare admits she signed a contract to sell, briefly. Fear was part of it, she said, namely worries over what might happen if the company invoked eminent domain and pressure from developers who wouldn't identify themselves. But the deal didn't sit right, and she and her mother pulled out, Bare told People in an exclusive interview. "Money couldn't move what all I've got put in place here," Huddleston told People. "So I just might as well stay and fight it out right where I'm at." Both women have since become vocal opponents of the project, telling local outlets they don't believe the promised jobs and economic growth will materialize. Huddleston calls the offer a scam. She and Bare point to reports of water shortages and groundwater contamination near data centers elsewhere in the country as reasons to keep the land as it is. "You can't get food out of a data center," Huddleston said in the People interview, "and everything coming out of the data center is going to be poison and destructive." Bare, who has never sold, says her attachment to the property runs deeper than money. "The more money you have, the more problems you have," she told People. "It never went through my mind that this was a Cinderella story. I never wanted to leave my land." The project will go on The family's refusal hasn't stopped the project. The company has instead assembled land from other owners who did agree to sell. A zoning request has been filed to rezone nearly 28 agricultural parcels, more than 2,000 acres total, and the local planning commission has since approved the rezoning, according to Local 12. The data center, if built, would sit next to the Huddleston farm rather than on it. County officials have said the project would bring hundreds of full-time jobs and well over a thousand construction jobs. Huddleston isn't persuaded. "I don't want your money, I don't need your money," she told LEX 18. "But I do feel sorry for everybody around us." The Huddlestons' standoff is one thread in a much larger fight playing out across rural America. Michigan township residents voted down an OpenAI-Oracle data center only to watch construction start weeks later; people are sharing their opposition in angry town halls nationwide against data centers, and the fight has become a cross-partisan political issue in Texas as farmers and ranchers push back against Big Tech's search for cheap land and power.

'They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we're not': Family declines $26 million offer to convert their farmland into an AI data center

AI companies may have the cash to throw around, but some can't be bought so easily. If one thing is true about AI, it's that there's a lot of money in it. Nvidia became the first $5 trillion company because of its role in the explosion of AI data centers, and OpenAI has been rounding up tens of billions in investments. So you'd think AI companies could buy pretty much whatever they want -- but one farming family in Northern Kentucky showed that's not the case by turning down a $26 million bid. As reported by WKRC-TV Local 12, Ida Huddleston was offered the sum for half of her 1,200-acre farmland this year, which an unnamed company would turn into an AI data center. Huddleston's daughter, Delsia Bare, reportedly said she would "stay and hold and feed a nation" and that "$26 million doesn't mean anything." AI data centers have become an ethical and ideological battleground, with Elon Musk's SpaceXAI only this week agreeing to take down 69 temporary methane turbines in Memphis over the next year in reaction to resident concerns over local disruption. In this case, Bare claims there's history to the site that the data center company would be ignoring. She told Local 12, "My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it." She continues, "[They] even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn't have anything else." Bare claims to be among "dozens of landowners" approached by the anonymous buyer, who reportedly represents a major AI company. Notably, Local 12 claims that the land where Bare lives is worth around $6,000 per acre, which makes the offer around ten times the actual value. Huddleston tells Local 12, "They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we're not. We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don't have any water -- and that poison. Well, we know we've had it." Huddleston is also sceptical of claims of economic growth as a result of the AI data center. "I say they're a liar, and the truth isn't in them. That's what I say. It's a scam." Data center pushback has been a common theme of the growth of AI, with concerns of both an environmental and ethical nature being front and centre. And AI companies have a lot of money to throw around. Even if you own a lot of land, $26 million must be a life-changing amount of money to anyone but the richest of the rich; it would even be enough to buy some of the RAM that AI data centers have been gleefully sucking up over the last few years. Just a thought.