Ida Huddleston and her family have owned a farm in northern Kentucky for generations, and last year a major artificial intelligence company offered them $26 million to sell part of their 1,200 acres. Land in the area sells at about $6,000 per acre, making the offer worth roughly ten times that amount. Most farming families would have seized such an opportunity. The Huddlestons refused.
Huddleston and her family declined, saying they didn't want a data centre built near them or on any of their 1,200 acres of farmland outside Maysville, Kentucky. Huddleston's daughter, Delsia Bare, said "Stay and hold and feed a nation," noting that her grandfather and great-grandfather and whole families have all lived there for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it.
At 82, Huddleston has lived through the technological transformation of rural America. She voiced scepticism about the company's promises. "They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we're not," Huddleston told local news, explaining that residents know "whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don't have any water — and that poison," referring to water shortages and ground poisoning widely reported near data centres.
The Maysville family's decision is not isolated. Similar conflicts are emerging across the country as tech companies seek rural land for AI-powered projects. In Pennsylvania, 86-year-old Mervin Raudabaugh rejected a $15.7 million offer from data centre developers and instead sold development rights to the Lancaster Farmland Trust for under $2 million, legally ensuring the land will remain farmland forever. In Indiana, farmers say inflated land offers are driving up property taxes and putting expansion out of reach for anyone who actually wants to farm, meaning even those who refuse to sell end up paying a financial price.
The tech expansion is substantial. The average data centre land transaction has grown to 224 acres, up 144 per cent since 2022. Large data centres can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day for cooling, equivalent to the daily usage of a town of 10,000 to 50,000 people, and much of that water evaporates in the cooling process and is never recovered.
In Mason County, the project continues despite the Huddlestons' refusal. The company revised its plans using land from owners who agreed to sell, meaning the data centre could still be built nearby. A zoning request has been filed to rezone nearly 28 agricultural parcels totalling more than 2,000 acres, and the Joint Planning Commission is scheduled to hold public meetings on March 25 and 26 at Maysville Community and Technical College.
The genuine tension here deserves acknowledgment. Proponents of the Maysville project say it could create 400 full-time jobs and more than 1,500 construction positions, while in Loudoun County, Virginia, data centres have collected nearly $875 million in tax revenue in fiscal year 2025 and residents have seen property tax cuts as a result. For struggling rural communities, that economic potential is real.
Yet the question at stake goes beyond a single farm. Unlike traditional cloud facilities, AI data centres don't need to be situated near metropolitan areas, and developers look for large, contiguous parcels with access to power and water and few neighbours who are likely to push back. When hundreds of millions flow toward acquiring agricultural land, the cumulative effect reshapes what remains available to those who actually farm. At some point, the cost cannot be measured only in dollars.