Two northern Kentucky women have turned down an offer to sell around 600 acres of farmland for $26 million, with the prospective buyers seeking to build an AI data center.
As WKRC reported, the family is one of dozens who received similar offers. Delsia Bare and her mother, Ida Huddleston, own about 1,200 acres outside of Maysville. The parcel that the anonymous company wanted to purchase was about half of the land.
🚨BREAKING: Kentucky family rejects a $26 million offer to turn their farmland into a data center, roughly 10x the area's going rate.
— Jack (@jackunheard) March 24, 2026
"If it's my way, I'll stay and hold and feed a nation. 26 million doesn't mean anything."
pic.twitter.com/YZFinC3PZM
Normally, land in the area goes for about $6,000 per acre. This offer approached 10 times that.
While it might have sounded like a good deal on the surface, the family was adamant that they didn't want to sell.
"They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we're not," Huddleston said, per WKRC. "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."
AI data centers have been roundly criticized for their excessive energy use, causing air pollution and spikes in electricity prices for everyday consumers.
They also use a significant amount of water to cool their servers, which pollutes a vital resource. Even the noise from thousands of server fans presents a problem for local residents.
Many communities have worked hard to push AI companies out of their neighborhoods for these reasons.
Meanwhile, Huddleston and Bare did not want to break the deep connection they had with the land.
"As long as I'm on this land — as long as it's feeding me, as long as it's taking care of me — there's nothing that can destroy me if I've got this land," said Bare, per WKRC.
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"My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it," she added. "Even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn't have anything else."
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