When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s door last May, they took a deal worth more than $33 million in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had supported her family for centuries.
According to Huddleston, the men’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company,” sought her 650 acres (260 ha) in Mason County for an unspecified industrial development. Any further disclosures require signing a non-disclosure agreement.
More than a dozen of her neighbors did the same. Searching public records for answers, they found that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from a local power plant, nearly doubling its annual generating capacity.
An unknown company is building a datacenter.
“You don’t have enough to buy me. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m content,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence in the US and around the world, bids for Huddleston’s land are showing up on rural doorsteps across the country. Globally, 40,000 acres of land — real estate primed for datacenter development — is expected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.
However, despite the recent reductions in land value, farmers are increasingly closing their doors. At least five of Huddleston’s neighbors gave similar categorical denials, including one who was told he could quote any price.
In Pennsylvania, a farmer was turned down $15 million in January for land he had worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m in the same month. Other landowners have turned down offers above $120,000 an acre — prices unthinkable just a few years ago.
The rejections are a reminder of the physical limits of AI and the limits of the dollars behind the technology.
The New Gold Rush
Four generations of the Huddleston family have seen the world change from the same fields.
Ida’s grandfather was growing tobacco when the Civil War broke out. Her father plowed wheat through World War I and the long decline of the Great Depression. She and her five siblings grew up on beans, broccoli and potatoes once plucked from the ground by dust bowl winds. No one in her family went to college — but by age 10, her children could already graze cattle on the same fields as their ancestors.
“My whole life has been nothing but the land. It has provided me with anything and everything I needed for 82 years,” she says, speaking from the cabin her late husband built several decades ago using local wood and stone.
Today, where residents see meandering creeks and open pastures, Silicon Valley officials see weak zoning protections, cheap energy and abundant water.
Developers persist because there are billions to be made. Last November in northern Virginia, an investor paid $615 million for less than 100 acres — a property the seller bought four years ago for just $57 million. Days later, Amazon spent $700m on nearby farmland that sold for a fraction of the price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270m after paying $4m 12 months ago. For intermediaries who scout these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%.
‘Name your price’
Deals have reportedly been offered to about 20 Mason County residents, with the datacenter project expected to cover 2,000 acres.
After Dr. Timothy Grosser, 75, turned down an $8 million offer for his 250-acre farm — 3,500% more than he paid nearly four decades ago — developers are back with a new proposition: “Name your price.”
His answer: “None.”
A grazer lives on his land, hunts and raises livestock. Every Christmas, his family eats a turkey caught there by his grandson. Grosser estimated that Huddleston and, in addition to him, four other landowners refused to sell.
“All they did their whole lives was farm grain, cattle, tobacco,” Grosser said. “For people like me, it’s not worth giving up your lifestyle.”
Huddleston’s daughter, Delcia Bear, 56, runs deeper than connection skills. She remembers pulling weeds from tobacco fields with her mother and grandmother to make hay in Kentucky summers. “There’s a bond with the land,” she said. “There’s no way to undo it. It’s family, it’s history.”
Beyond the personal connection, some farmers are about wider consequences Worried. The number of US farms has fallen by more than 70% since 1935. Datacenters can distort power grids, drain local water supplies, pollute soil, and disrupt wildlife habitat.
Baer puts it more bluntly: “You’re not raising bread from the datacenter.”
Not everyone is catching up; Some Mason County farmers have agreed to sell if the project goes ahead. “You can’t blame them,” Grosser admits. “Giving them 10 million bucks for a farm?”
Those who refuse to sell are said to have been warned by the utility company that it could invoke eminent domain — the government’s power to seize private property for public use. The threat was not empty: Dominion Energy used it against a Virginia farmer last April.
‘Sometimes-self-sacrificial leadership’
The resistance reflects something economists struggle to quantify: the cultural weight of land management. In his book Love for the Land, author Brooks Lamb describes how the “sometimes-self-sacrificing stewardship” of family farmers leads to choices that defy economic logic, such as refusing to integrate into industrial operations.
“When told ‘get big or get out,’ these farmers don’t choose either,” he wrote.
Managing a farm is considered a “birthright” by many, says Mary Hendrickson, a professor of rural sociology at the University of Missouri. The responsibility to previous generations runs deep, sometimes dangerously so. During the farm crisis of the 1980s, when heavily indebted farmers faced bankruptcy and land loss, more than 900 male farmers in the Midwest committed suicide.
“They are somewhat irreversible,” Hendrickson said. “If you hand over the land to them, it destroys the land for agriculture.”
‘Keeping our people here’
Local officials in Mason County insist the datacenter will sustain future generations by bringing in much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument playing out in town halls across the country.
The mason population has declined by about 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of manufacturing. Developers say the datacenter project will bring 1,000 construction jobs, but it may only create 50 full-time operational jobs.
In places like Loudoun County, Virginia — home to “data center alley,” where up to one-fifth of the world’s Internet traffic passes — datacenter tax revenue is roughly equal to the county’s entire operating budget.
“We either shrink — losing population, losing jobs and watching our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere — or we chart a new course,” Tyler McHugh, Mason County’s director of industrial development, said at a public hearing in December. “It’s about keeping our people here.”
What money can’t buy
As they offer multimillion-dollar contracts, datacenter developers aren’t stealing Mason County land, though some farmers feel spiritually neglected.
A few months before the knock on her door last May, Delcia Bear had lost most of her vision. Now she relies on sound to connect with the land: birds singing, a running creek. She fears that the hum of the datacenter will drown out those connections, pushing agriculture out of physical reality and into memory.
For now, she returns to what her family has depended on for generations. “Land, land, land,” as her mother said.
As AI promises to overcome physical flaws, these standoffs expose its physical limitations — and Wall Street’s miscalculation of what some people value most. In Mason County and the rolling hills of farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.
