Meet the 82-year-old Kentucky grandma who turned down $26 million to turn her farm into data centers

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’s property for a proposed data center campus.

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’s offer topped $26 million, well above the roughly $6,000-an-acre going rate for farmland in the county.

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’t identify themselves. But the deal didn’t sit right, and she and her mother pulled out, Bare told People in an exclusive interview.

“Money couldn’t move what all I’ve got put in place here,” Huddleston told People. “So I just might as well stay and fight it out right where I’m at.”

Both women have since become vocal opponents of the project, telling local outlets they don’t 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.

“You can’t get food out of a data center,” Huddleston said in the People interview, “and everything coming out of the data center is going to be poison and destructive.”

Bare, who has never sold, says her attachment to the property runs deeper than money.

“The more money you have, the more problems you have,” she told People. “It never went through my mind that this was a Cinderella story. I never wanted to leave my land.”

The project will go on

The family’s refusal hasn’t 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.

County officials have said the project would bring hundreds of full-time jobs and well over a thousand construction jobs. Huddleston isn’t persuaded.

“I don’t want your money, I don’t need your money,” she told LEX 18. “But I do feel sorry for everybody around us.”

The Huddlestons’ 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’s search for cheap land and power.