US farmers are rejecting multimillion-dollar datacenter bids for their land: 'I'm not for sale' [View all]
When two men knocked on Ida Huddleston’s 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’s client, an unnamed “Fortune 100 company”, 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.
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.
The unknown company was building a datacenter.
“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” Huddleston, 82, later told the men.
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’s land are appearing on rural doorsteps nationwide. Globally, 40,000 acres of powered land – real estate prepped for datacenter development – are projected to be needed for new projects over the next five years, double the amount currently in use.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2026/feb/21/us-farmers-datacenters
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