US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: ‘I’m not for sale’ | AI (artificial intelligence)
When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they were carrying a contract worth more than $33 million in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.
According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company,” was seeking 650 acres (260 ha) of land in Mason County for an unspecified industrial development. Learning more will require signing a confidentiality agreement.
More than a dozen of his neighbors knocked on the same door. While searching public records for answers, they discovered: a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project, almost twice the annual generating capacity from the local power plant.
The unknown company was building a data center.
Huddleston, 82, then told the men, “You don’t have enough money to buy me. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied.”
As tech companies race to build the massive data centers needed to power artificial intelligence in the U.S. and around the world, offers like the one for Huddleston’s land are reaching the doorsteps of rural communities across the country. Globally, 40,000 acres of electrified land (real estate) prepared for data center development predicted The amount that will be needed for new projects over the next five years is twice the amount currently in use.
But despite sums that often dwarf the current value of the land, farmers are increasingly closing the door. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors made similar categorical denials; including one who is said to be able to offer any price for one of them.
A farmer in Pennsylvania rejected In January, he received $15 million for the land he worked on for 50 years. a Wisconsin farmer returned It dropped by $80 million in the same month. Other landowners refused offers Prices exceeding $120,000 per acre were unimaginable just a few years ago.
The rejections are a jarring reminder of the physical limits of artificial intelligence and the limits of the money behind the technology.
The New Gold Rush
Four generations of the Huddleston family have watched the world change from the same fields.
Ida’s grandfather was growing tobacco when the civil war broke out. His father farmed wheat during the long ravages of World War I and the Great Depression. He and his five siblings grew up with beans, broccoli and potatoes dug from ground once scorched by dusty winds. No one in his family had ever gone to college; However, when their children turned 10, they started herding cattle on the same land as their ancestors.
“My whole life is the land. It has provided me with everything I need for 82 years,” she says, speaking from the cabin her late husband built decades ago using local wood and rocks.
Today, where residents see meandering streams and open pastures, Silicon Valley executives see weak zoning protections, cheap energy and abundant water.
Developers keep knocking on the door because there are billions to be made. An investor in northern Virginia last November mercenary $615 million for less than 100 acres – property sales person He bought it four years ago for just $57 million. Days later Amazon spent Nearby farmland, which sold for well below that price the previous year, sold for $700 million. A local developer in Georgia translated After paying $4 million 12 months ago, the land was given to Amazon for $270 million. The potential return for brokers exploring these deals exceeds 1000%.
‘Specify your price’
About 20 Mason County residents reportedly An agreement was offered for the data center project estimated It will cover 2,000 acres.
75 year old Dr. After Timothy Grosser rejected an $8 million offer for his 250-acre farm (3,500% more than he paid nearly four decades ago), developers came back with a new offer: “Name your price.”
His answer: “None of them.”
Grosser lives, hunts, and raises cattle on his own land. His family eats the turkey his grandson caught there every Christmas. Grosser estimates that four landowners besides Huddleston and himself refused to sell.
“The only thing they did their whole lives was farm grain, cattle and tobacco,” Grosser says. “For them, like me, money is not worth giving up your lifestyle.”
For Huddleston’s daughter, Delsia Bare, 56, the connection goes deeper than skills. He remembers hoeing weeds and planting hay in tobacco fields with his mother and grandmother during Kentucky summers. “There is a connection with the land,” he says. “There’s no way to undo this. This is family, this is history.”
Some farmers worry about broader consequences beyond personal commitment. number U.S. farms have fallen more than 70% since 1935. Data centers can strain power grids, deplete local water supplies, pollute soil and fragment wildlife habitats.
Bare puts it more clearly: “You won’t be able to grow a loaf of bread from a data center.”
Not everyone resists; Some farmers in Mason County have agreed to sell if the project moves forward. “You can’t blame them,” Grosser says. “You’re giving them $10 million for a farm?”
Those who refuse to sell say it warns the utility company could use its eminent domain, the power to seize private property for public use. The threat is not empty: Domination Energy he used it against a Virginia farmer last April.
‘Sometimes self-sacrificing management’
The resistance reflects something economists have difficulty measuring: the cultural weight of land management. In his book Love for the Land, author Brooks Lamb describes how the “sometimes altruistic management” of family farmers can lead to choices that defy financial logic, such as refusing to participate in industrial operations.
“When told to ‘grow up or go out,’ these farmers choose neither,” he writes.
Maintaining the homestead is viewed by many as a “birthright,” says Mary Hendrickson, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri. Responsibility to previous generations can be profound and sometimes dangerous. During the farm crisis of the 1980s, when heavily indebted farmers faced bankruptcy and land loss, more than that 900 male farmers committed suicide in the Midwest.
“These things are kind of irreversible,” Hendrickson says. “If you give the land to them, it destroys the arable nature of that land.”
‘We keep our people here’
Local officials in Mason County insist the data center will sustain future generations by providing much-needed tax revenue and jobs; This claim is also being discussed in town halls across the country.
Mason’s population has decreased by approximately 10% since 1980, largely due to loss of production. Developers to say The data center project will create 1,000 construction jobs but only 50 full-time operational jobs.
In places like Loudoun County, Virginia, home to “Data Center Street” fifth 10% of the world’s internet traffic passes; data center tax revenue almost equals the district’s entire operating budget.
“We can continue to lose population, lose jobs and downsize, watching our young people move on to other opportunities,” Tyler McHugh, Mason County’s director of industrial development, said at a public hearing in December. “This is about keeping our people here.”
What is something money can’t buy
Data center developers aren’t stealing Mason County’s land as they offer multimillion-dollar deals, but some farmers still feel a moral deprivation.
A few months before the knock on her door last May, Delsia Bare lost most of her vision. He now relies on sound to connect with the land: birds singing, the stream flowing. He fears that the hum of a data center will drown out those connections and push the farm from physical reality into memory.
For now, he’s returning to what his family has relied on for generations. “Land, land, land,” as his mother puts it.
While AI promises to overcome bodily fallibility, these contradictions reveal AI’s physical limitations and Wall Street’s miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason County and farmland across America, that difference is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.
