Tech companies are spending many billions of dollars on massive data center projects across the country amid the ongoing AI boom, but not everyone is willing to sell.<\/p>\n
An 82-year-old Kentucky farmer and her family rejected an offer of more than $26 million to give over roughly half of their 1,200-acre family farm to an unnamed company planning a massive data center project.<\/p>\n
\u201cThey call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we\u2019re not,\u201d Ida Huddleston told the local news outlet WKRC<\/a> earlier this year. \u201cWe know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don\u2019t have any water\u2014and that poison. Well, we know we\u2019ve had it.\u201d<\/p>\n Family farm fed the hungry during Great Depression <\/p>\n Huddleston\u2019s daughter, Delsia Bare, told WKRC that the family has owned the land outside Maysville, Kentucky, for generations and even grew wheat used to help supply bread lines during the Great Depression. Beyond their personal connection to the property, the family has concerns about the project\u2019s water use and potential pollution.<\/p>\n Farmland in Mason County is worth roughly $6,000 an acre, according to Fortune<\/a>. However, Huddleston was offered about $60,000 an acre for 71 acres, while Bare was offered $48,000 an acre for 463 acres. Together, the offers came to $26 million.<\/p>\n Bare told People Magazine<\/a> that the family initially signed a contract to sell, fearing that the company would lobby the county government to invoke eminent domain and force them to sell for far less. They regretted the decision almost immediately and ultimately backed out of the deal. Bare has since joined a lawsuit challenging the project.<\/p>\n \u201cMoney don\u2019t mean anything if you don\u2019t have food, water and can\u2019t breathe. And they\u2019re not making any more land,\u201d Huddleston told People. \u201cYou can\u2019t get food out of a data center.\u201d<\/p>\n For some, the money is too good to pass up <\/p>\n Still, other nearby landowners agreed to sell and in May Data Center Dynamics reported<\/a> that the Mason County Fiscal Court approved the rezoning of 28 properties totaling roughly 2,080 acres for a proposed data center development.<\/p>\n The project arrives as major tech companies like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and OpenAI are pouring billions of dollars into the infrastructure needed to train and run increasingly powerful AI models.\u00a0But these projects have also sparked a growing backlash, especially from local residents worried about the strain these massive facilities could place on water supplies, power grids, and their communities.<\/p>\n In some cases, that opposition has already helped defeat some proposed<\/a>\u00a0data center<\/a>\u00a0projects.<\/p>\n \u2018You can\u2019t fight it. You have to go with it,\u2019 Trump says <\/p>\n While some lawmakers have called for a\u00a0national moratorium<\/a> on the construction or expansion of new AI data center projects, President Donald Trump\u2019s administration has taken a largely hands-off approach to regulating data center construction, arguing that unfettered AI development is important for national security.<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to convince your communities how great these things are,\u201d Trump recently told an audience<\/a>\u00a0when discussing data centers. \u201cYou can\u2019t fight it. You have to go with it.\u201d<\/p>\n On the local level, severa local governments have already adopted or explored temporary restrictions<\/a>\u00a0on new data center development including\u00a0Seattle<\/a>, Minneapolis and several communities in New Jersey<\/p>\n Last month, New York became the first state in the country to impose a statewide moratorium<\/a> on data center projects. Even famously pro-business Texas has ordered regulators to audit every large data center project<\/a> seeking to connect to the state\u2019s main power grid.<\/p>\n Supporters of these projects often point to the jobs, tax revenue, and other investment these projects can bring to communities.<\/p>\n Huddleston, however, remains unconvinced.<\/p>\n \u201cI say they\u2019re a liar, and the truth isn\u2019t in them,\u201d Huddleston told WKRC. \u201cThat\u2019s what I say. It\u2019s a scam.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Tech companies are spending many billions of dollars on massive data center projects across the country amid the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":580947,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,3132,85,46,125],"class_list":["post-580946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-data-centers","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580946","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=580946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/580946\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/580947"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=580946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=580946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=580946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}