Ida Huddleston has lived on the same stretch of farmland outside Maysville, Kentucky, since she was 16. She and her late husband built a log home there, raised children, and worked the soil through six decades of marriage. Today, the family owns roughly 1,200 acres, and multiple generations still live on it.<\/p>\n
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Last spring, an unnamed company described only as a major artificial intelligence firm came looking for a piece of it, according to WKRC Local 12. The company approached dozens of landowners in Mason County about buying roughly half of the Huddleston family\u2019s property for a proposed data center campus. <\/p>\n
Huddleston, 82, was offered about $60,000 an acre for her 71 acres, over $4 million. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, 54, was offered $48,000 an acre for her 463 acres, putting her potential payout above $22 million. Combined, the family\u2019s offer topped $26 million, well above the roughly $6,000-an-acre going rate for farmland in the county.<\/p>\n
Bare admits she signed a contract to sell, briefly. Fear was part of it, she said, namely worries over what might happen if the company invoked eminent domain and pressure from developers who wouldn\u2019t identify themselves. But the deal didn\u2019t sit right, and she and her mother pulled out, Bare told People<\/em> in an exclusive interview.<\/p>\n\u201cMoney couldn\u2019t move what all I\u2019ve got put in place here,\u201d Huddleston told People<\/em>. \u201cSo I just might as well stay and fight it out right where I\u2019m at.\u201d<\/p>\nBoth women have since become vocal opponents of the project, telling local outlets they don\u2019t believe the promised jobs and economic growth will materialize. Huddleston calls the offer a scam. She and Bare point to reports of water shortages and groundwater contamination near data centers elsewhere in the country as reasons to keep the land as it is.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can\u2019t get food out of a data center,\u201d Huddleston said in the People<\/em> interview, \u201cand everything coming out of the data center is going to be poison and destructive.\u201d<\/p>\nBare, who has never sold, says her attachment to the property runs deeper than money.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe more money you have, the more problems you have,\u201d she told People<\/em>. \u201cIt never went through my mind that this was a Cinderella story. I never wanted to leave my land.\u201d<\/p>\nThe project will go on<\/h2>\n
The family\u2019s refusal hasn\u2019t stopped the project. The company has instead assembled land from other owners who did agree to sell. A zoning request has been filed to rezone nearly 28 agricultural parcels, more than 2,000 acres total, and the local planning commission has since approved the rezoning, according to Local 12. The data center, if built, would sit next to the Huddleston farm rather than on it.<\/p>\n
County officials have said the project would bring hundreds of full-time jobs and well over a thousand construction jobs. Huddleston isn\u2019t persuaded.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want your money, I don\u2019t need your money,\u201d she told LEX 18. \u201cBut I do feel sorry for everybody around us.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Huddlestons\u2019 standoff is one thread in a much larger fight playing out across rural America. Michigan township residents voted down an OpenAI-Oracle data center only to watch construction start weeks later; people are sharing their opposition in angry town halls nationwide against data centers, and the fight has become a cross-partisan political issue in Texas as farmers and ranchers push back against Big Tech\u2019s search for cheap land and power.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
#Meet #82yearold #Kentucky #grandma #turned #million #turn #farm #data #centers<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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