\n<\/p>\n
When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston\u2019s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries.<\/p>\n
According to Huddleston, the men\u2019s client, an unnamed \u201cFortune 100 company\u201d, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial development. Finding out any more would require signing a non-disclosure agreement.<\/p>\n
More than a dozen of her neighbors received the same knock. Searching public records for answers, they discovered that a new customer had applied for a 2.2 gigawatt project from the local power plant, nearly double its annual generation capacity.<\/p>\n
The unknown company was building a datacenter.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou don\u2019t have enough to buy me out. I\u2019m not for sale. Leave me alone, I\u2019m satisfied,\u201d Huddleston, 82, later told the men.<\/p>\n
As tech companies race to build the massive datacenters needed to power artificial intelligence across the US and the world, bids like the one for Huddleston\u2019s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land \u2013 real estate prepped for datacenter development \u2013 are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.<\/p>\n
Yet despite sums that often dwarf the land\u2019s recent value, farmers are increasingly shutting the door. At least five of Huddleston\u2019s neighbors gave similar categorical rejections, including one who was told he could name any price.<\/p>\n
In Pennsylvania, a farmer rejected $15m in January for land he\u2019d worked for 50 years. A Wisconsin farmer turned down $80m the same month. Other landowners have declined offers exceeding $120,000 per acre \u2013 prices unimaginable just a few years ago.<\/p>\n
The rebuffs are a jarring reminder of AI\u2019s physical bounds, and limits of the dollars behind the technology.<\/p>\n
Four generations of the Huddleston family have watched the world change from the same fields.<\/p>\n
Ida\u2019s grandfather was growing tobacco when the civil war erupted. Her father ploughed wheat through the first world war and the long attrition of the Great Depression. She and her five siblings grew up on beans, broccoli and potatoes pulled from soil once seared by dust bowl winds. No one in her family went to college \u2013 but by age 10, her children could already herd cattle across the same ground as their forebears.<\/p>\n
<\/span>Ida Huddleston (left) and her daughter Delsia Bare.<\/span> Photograph: Janet Garrison<\/p>\n \u201cMy whole entire life is nothing but the land. It\u2019s provided me with anything and everything that I\u2019ve needed for 82 years,\u201d she says, speaking from the cabin her late husband built using local wood and rocks many decades ago.<\/p>\n Today, where residents see meandering creeks and open pastures, Silicon Valley executives see weak zoning protections, cheap power and abundant water.<\/p>\n Developers keep knocking because there are billions to be made. In northern Virginia last November, an investor paid $615m for less than 100 acres \u2013 property the seller had bought for just $57m four years prior. Days later, Amazon spent $700m on nearby farmland that had sold for a fraction of that price the year before. In Georgia, a local developer flipped land to Amazon for $270m after paying $4m for it 12 months earlier. For the middlemen scouting these deals, potential returns exceed 1,000%.<\/p>\n About 20 Mason county residents have reportedly been offered deals, with the datacenter project estimated to cover 2,000 acres.<\/p>\n After Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, rejected an $8m offer for his 250-acre farm \u2013 3,500% more than he\u2019d paid nearly four decades earlier \u2013 the developers came back with a new proposition: \u201cName your price.\u201d<\/p>\n His answer: \u201cThere is none.\u201d<\/p>\n Grosser lives, hunts and raises cattle on his land. Each Christmas, his family eats a turkey his grandson catches there. Alongside Huddleston and himself, Grosser estimates four landowners have refused to sell.<\/p>\n \u201cAll they\u2019ve done all their life is farm grain, cattle, tobacco,\u201d Grosser says. \u201cTo them, same as me, the money\u2019s not worth giving up your lifestyle.\u201d<\/p>\n For Huddleston\u2019s daughter, Delsia Bare, 56, the connection runs deeper than skill sets. She remembers hoeing weeds from tobacco fields alongside her mother and grandmother, putting up hay through Kentucky summers. \u201cThere\u2019s a bond with the land,\u201d she says. \u201cThere\u2019s no way to undo it. That\u2019s family, that\u2019s history.\u201d<\/p>\n Beyond personal attachment, some farmers worry about broader consequences. The number of US farms has dropped more than 70% since 1935. Datacenters can strain power grids, drain local water supplies, contaminate soil and fragment wildlife habitat.<\/p>\n Bare puts it more bluntly: \u201cYou\u2019re not going to grow a loaf of bread off of a datacenter.\u201d<\/p>\n Not everyone is holding out; some Mason county farmers have agreed to sell if the project proceeds. \u201cYou can\u2019t blame them,\u201d Grosser acknowledges. \u201cGiving them 10 million bucks for a farm?\u201d<\/p>\n Those who refuse to sell say the utility company has warned it may invoke eminent domain \u2013 the government power to seize private property for public use. The threat isn\u2019t empty: Dominion Energy used it against a Virginia farmer last April.<\/p>\n The resistance reflects something economists struggle to quantify: the cultural weight of land stewardship. In his book Love for the Land, author Brooks Lamb describes how family farmers\u2019 \u201csometimes-self-sacrificial stewardship\u201d can lead to choices that defy financial logic, like refusing to consolidate into industrial operations.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen told to \u2018get big or get out\u2019, these farmers choose neither,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n Maintaining the farm is viewed as a \u201cbirthright\u201d, 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 1980s\u2019 farm crisis, when heavily indebted farmers faced bankruptcy and land loss, more than 900 male farmers in the midwest committed suicide.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re somewhat irreversible,\u201d Hendrickson says. \u201cIf you give the land over to them, it destroys what that land could be for agriculture.\u201d<\/p>\n Local officials in Mason county insist the datacenter would sustain future generations by bringing much-needed tax revenue and jobs, an argument being made in town halls across the country.<\/p>\n Mason\u2019s population has shrunk by around 10% since 1980, largely due to the loss of manufacturing. Developers say the datacenter project would bring 1,000 construction jobs, although it may only create 50 full-time operational jobs.<\/p>\n In places like Loudoun county, Virginia \u2013 home to \u201cData Center Alley\u201d, where about a fifth of the world\u2019s internet traffic goes through \u2013 datacenter tax revenue nearly equals the county\u2019s entire operating budget.<\/p>\n \u201cWe can continue to shrink \u2013 losing population, losing jobs and watching our young people leave for opportunities elsewhere \u2013 or we can chart a new course,\u201d Tyler McHugh, Mason county\u2019s industrial development director, said at a public hearing in December. \u201cIt\u2019s about keeping our people here.\u201d<\/p>\n As they offer multimillion-dollar deals, datacenter developers are not stealing Mason county land, yet some farmers feel a spiritual dispossession nonetheless.<\/p>\n A few months before the knock on her door last May, Delsia Bare lost most of her vision. Now she relies on sound to connect with the land: singing birds, the running creek. She fears a datacenter\u2019s hum will drown out those connections, pushing the farm from physical reality into memory.<\/p>\n For now, she returns to what her family has relied on for generations. \u201cThe land, the land, the land,\u201d as her mother puts it.<\/p>\n As AI promises to transcend corporeal fallibility, these standoffs reveal its very physical constraints \u2013 and Wall Street\u2019s miscalculation of what some people value most. In the rolling hills of Mason county and farmland across America, that gap is measured not in dollars but in something harder to price: identity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston\u2019s door last May, they carried a contract worth more than $33m in exchange for the Kentucky farm that had fed her family for centuries. According to Huddleston, the men\u2019s client, an unnamed \u201cFortune 100 company\u201d, sought her 650 acres (260 hectares) in Mason county for an unspecified industrial<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44922,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[1564,1546,16828,5185,1443,1307,14473,3549,545],"class_list":{"0":"post-44921","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-environment","8":"tag-artificial","9":"tag-bids","10":"tag-datacenter","11":"tag-farmers","12":"tag-intelligence","13":"tag-land","14":"tag-multimilliondollar","15":"tag-rejecting","16":"tag-sale"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=44921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44921\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/44922"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=44921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=44921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=44921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\u2018Name your price\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u2018Sometimes-self-sacrificial stewardship\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\u2018Keeping our people here\u2019<\/strong><\/h2>\n
What money can\u2019t buy<\/strong><\/h2>\n