Ida Huddleston and her family, who owned a Kentucky farm for generations recently turned down a massive offer by a “major artificial intelligence company,” to sell part of their farm for a proposed data center. Huddleston and her family said they didn’t want a data center built near them or on any of their 1,200 acres of farmland outside Maysville, Kentucky, as they declined the $26 million offer.
“They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we’re not,” Huddleston, who is 82, told Local 12 WKRC. “We know whenever our food is disappearing, our lands are disappearing, and we don’t have any water — and that poison. Well, we know we’ve had it.” Huddleston was apparently referring to the recent water shortages and ground poisoning that’s been widely reported in land near data centers.
READ: Amazon plans $12 billion data center buildout in Louisiana (February 24, 2026)
Huddleston and her daughter Delsia Bare, who hold majority of the land, are among an increasing number of farmers who refused to sell their land to an anonymous tech company–likely Google, Amazon, or Meta, according to reports. Bare says the huge cash offers fail to understand her family’s ties to the area. She added: “As long as I’m on this land, as long as it’s feeding me, as long as it’s taking care of me, there’s nothing that can destroy me if I’ve got this land.”
Bare mentioned how her family had deep ties to the land. “My grandfather and great-grandfather and a whole bunch of family have all lived here for years, paid taxes on it, fed a nation off of it,” she said. “Even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn’t have anything else,” she added.
Huddleston also told WKRC that she doubted the data center would bring jobs or economic growth to Mason County. “It’s a scam,” she said.
READ: Adani aims to create the world’s largest integrated data center by 2035 (February 17, 2026)
The unnamed company reportedly revised its plans and filed a zoning request to rezone more than 2,000 acres in northern Kentucky, according to the report, meaning the AI firm may still build its data center next to Huddleston’s land.
This comes as Big Tech companies like Meta, Amazon, OpenAI and Google are racing to build data centers to power artificial intelligence. AI depends on robust infrastructure—capacity for high-speed computing, power, cooling, and fiber connectivity, and companies in the U.S. are pouring billions of dollars into this. However, these data center-building efforts have also been heavily criticized for the heavy consumption of energy and water involved. There have also been reports of data centers causing well contamination, noise, and light disruptions for nearby residents in rural America.