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 had signed 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 its 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason County for unspecified industrial development. To find out more, you would need to sign a non-disclosure agreement.

More than a dozen of his neighbors received the same blow. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project with the local power plant, nearly double its annual generating capacity.

The unknown company was building a data center.

“You don’t have enough to buy me back. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.

As tech companies race to build the massive data centers needed for artificial intelligence in the United States and around the world, deals like the one for Huddleston land are appearing on the doorsteps of rural areas across the country. Globally, 40,000 acres of energized land – real estate primed for data center development – ​​is expected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount of land currently in use.

However, despite sums that often exceed the recent value of the land, farmers are increasingly closing the door. At least five Huddleston neighbors issued similar outright refusals, including one who was told he could name any price.

In Pennsylvania, a farmer in January refused $15 million for land he had worked on for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80 million that same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 an acre – prices unimaginable just a few years ago.

The snubs are a shocking reminder of the physical limits of AI and the limits of the investments behind the technology.

The new gold rush

Four generations of the Huddleston family have seen the world change in the same areas.

Ida’s grandfather was growing tobacco when the Civil War broke out. His father plowed wheat during World War I and the long attrition of the Great Depression. She and her five siblings grew up on beans, broccoli and potatoes dug from the soil once scorched by the dust bowl’s winds. None of his family went to college, but by age 10, his children could already herd cattle on the same land as their ancestors.

“My whole life is nothing but the land. It provided me with everything I needed for 82 years,” she says from the cabin her late husband built with local wood and stone decades ago.

Today, where locals see meandering streams and open pastures, Silicon Valley leaders see weak zoning protections, cheap electricity and plentiful water.

Developers continue to strike because there are billions to be made. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615 million for less than 100 acres — property the seller had purchased for just $57 million four years earlier. Days later, Amazon spent $700 million on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the previous year. In Georgia, a local developer sold land to Amazon for $270 million after paying $4 million 12 months earlier. For the intermediaries who monitor these transactions, the potential returns exceed 1,000%.

“Name your price”

About 20 Mason County residents have reportedly been offered deals, with the data center project estimated to span 2,000 acres.

After Dr. Timothy Grosser, 75, rejected an $8 million offer for his 250-acre farm — 3,500 percent more than he paid nearly four decades earlier — developers came back with a new proposition: “Name your price.”

His response: “There isn’t.”

Grosser lives, hunts and raises livestock on his land. Every Christmas, his family eats a turkey that his grandson catches there. Along with Huddleston and himself, Grosser estimates that four landowners refused to sell.

“All they did their whole lives was grow grain, livestock and tobacco,” Grosser said. “For them, as for me, money is not worth giving up your lifestyle.”

For Huddleston’s daughter, Delsia Bare, 56, the connection goes deeper than skill set. She remembers hoeing weeds from tobacco fields alongside her mother and grandmother, and harvesting hay during Kentucky summers. “There is a connection with the land,” she says. “There’s no way to undo it. It’s family, it’s history.”

Beyond personal attachment, some farmers worry about the broader consequences. The number of U.S. farms has fallen more than 70 percent since 1935. Data centers can strain power grids, drain local water supplies, contaminate soil and fragment wildlife habitat.

Bare puts it more bluntly: “You’re not going to grow a loaf of bread out of a data center. »

Not everyone holds up; some Mason County farmers have agreed to sell if the project comes to fruition. “You can’t blame them,” Grosser admits. “Give them $10 million for a farm?

Those refusing to sell say the utility company has warned it may invoke eminent domain — the government’s power to seize private property for public use. The threat is not in vain: Dominion Energy used it against a Virginia farmer last April.

“Sometimes sacrificial management”

This resistance reflects something that economists have difficulty quantifying: the cultural weight of land management. In his book Love for the Land, author Brooks Lamb describes how family farmers’ “sometimes altruistic management” can lead to choices that defy financial logic, such as refusing to consolidate into industrial operations.

“When told to go big or make it big, these farmers choose neither,” he writes.

Maintaining the farm is considered a “birthright” by many, says Mary Hendrickson, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri. The responsibility towards previous generations is deep, sometimes dangerous. During the agricultural crisis of the 1980s, when heavily indebted farmers faced bankruptcy and loss of their land, more than 900 Midwestern farmers committed suicide.

“They’re somewhat irreversible,” Hendrickson says. “If you give them the land, it destroys what that land could be used for agriculture. »

“Keep our people here”

Local Mason County officials insist the data center would support future generations by generating much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument made at town halls across the country.

Mason’s population has declined by about 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of the manufacturing sector. Developers say the data center project would create 1,000 construction jobs, although it could only create 50 full-time operational jobs.

In places like Loudoun County, Virginia – home to “Data Center Alley,” where about one-fifth of the world’s Internet traffic passes – tax revenue from data centers is almost equal to the county’s entire operating budget.

“We can continue to decline – losing population, losing jobs and seeing our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere – or we can chart a new path,” Mason County Industrial Development Director Tyler McHugh said at a public hearing in December. “It’s about keeping our people here.”

What money can’t buy

By offering multimillion-dollar deals, data center developers aren’t stealing Mason County land, but some farmers nonetheless feel spiritual dispossession.

A few months before knocking on her door last May, Delsia Bare lost most of her vision. Now she relies on sound to connect with the land: the birdsong, the flowing stream. She worries that the hum of a data center will drown out these connections, shifting the farm from physical reality to memory.

For now, she’s returning to what her family has relied on for generations. “Earth, earth, earth,” as his mother says.

As AI promises to transcend bodily fallibility, these confrontations reveal its physical constraints — and Wall Street’s miscalculation of what some people value most. In the hills of Mason County and on the farmlands across America, this gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to assess: identity.