Tech companies are spending many billions of dollars on massive data center projects across the country amid the ongoing AI boom, but not everyone is willing to sell.
An 82-year-old Kentucky farmer and her family rejected an offer of more than $26 million to give over roughly half of their 1,200-acre family farm to an unnamed company planning a massive data center project.
“They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not,” Ida Huddleston told the local news outlet WKRC earlier this year. “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.”
Family farm fed the hungry during Great Depression
Huddleston’s daughter, Delsia Bare, told WKRC that the family has owned the land outside Maysville, Kentucky, for generations and even grew wheat used to help supply bread lines during the Great Depression. Beyond their personal connection to the property, the family has concerns about the project’s water use and potential pollution.
Farmland in Mason County is worth roughly $6,000 an acre, according to Fortune. However, Huddleston was offered about $60,000 an acre for 71 acres, while Bare was offered $48,000 an acre for 463 acres. Together, the offers came to $26 million.
Bare told People Magazine that the family initially signed a contract to sell, fearing that the company would lobby the county government to invoke eminent domain and force them to sell for far less. They regretted the decision almost immediately and ultimately backed out of the deal. Bare has since joined a lawsuit challenging the project.
“Money don’t mean anything if you don’t have food, water and can’t breathe. And they’re not making any more land,” Huddleston told People. “You can’t get food out of a data center.”
For some, the money is too good to pass up
Still, other nearby landowners agreed to sell and in May Data Center Dynamics reported that the Mason County Fiscal Court approved the rezoning of 28 properties totaling roughly 2,080 acres for a proposed data center development.
The project arrives as major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are pouring billions of dollars into the infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful AI models. But these projects have also sparked a growing backlash, especially from local residents worried about the strain these massive facilities could place on water supplies, power grids, and their communities.
In some cases, that opposition has already helped defeat some proposed data center projects.
‘You can’t fight it. You have to go with it,’ Trump says
While some lawmakers have called for a national moratorium on the construction or expansion of new AI data center projects, President Donald Trump’s administration has taken a largely hands-off approach to regulating data center construction, arguing that unfettered AI development is important for national security.
“You have to convince your communities how great these things are,” Trump recently told an audience when discussing data centers. “You can’t fight it. You have to go with it.”
On the local level, severa local governments have already adopted or explored temporary restrictions on new data center development including Seattle, Minneapolis and several communities in New Jersey
Last month, New York became the first state in the country to impose a statewide moratorium on data center projects. Even famously pro-business Texas has ordered regulators to audit every large data center project seeking to connect to the state’s main power grid.
Supporters of these projects often point to the jobs, tax revenue, and other investment these projects can bring to communities.
Huddleston, however, remains unconvinced.
“I say they’re a liar, and the truth isn’t in them,” Huddleston told WKRC. “That’s what I say. It’s a scam.”
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