Meet the 82-year-old Kentucky grandma who turned down $26 million to turn her farm into a data center: ‘I don’t need your money’

Ida Huddleston has spent nearly her whole life on the same Kentucky farmland outside Maysville, since she was 16. She and her late husband built a log home there, raised kids, and worked the ground through six decades together. The family now holds roughly 1,200 acres, with several generations still living on it. So when an unnamed AI company came calling last spring, offering to buy up land for a data center campus, it wasn't a small ask — and it wasn't a small offer either.

Huddleston, 82, was offered about $60,000 an acre for her 71 acres, more than $4 million total. Her daughter, Delsia Bare, 54, was offered $48,000 an acre for her 463 acres, putting her number above $22 million. Combined, the family's offer topped $26 million — dramatically above the roughly $6,000-an-acre going rate for farmland in Mason County. Bare actually signed a contract at one point, driven partly by fear over what might happen if the company pushed eminent domain, and partly by pressure from developers who wouldn't even give their names. But something about it felt wrong, and she and her mother backed out.

Huddleston's reasoning isn't complicated. She's called the offer a scam and pointed to water shortages and groundwater contamination reported near data centers elsewhere as proof the tradeoff isn't worth it. "You can't get food out of a data center," she told People, "and everything coming out of the data center is going to be poison and destructive." Bare's attachment runs just as deep — she says she never sold, never wanted to leave, and doesn't buy the idea that this was some financial fairy tale waiting to happen.

And here's the thing: their refusal didn't stop anything. The company simply built its footprint from other landowners willing to sell. A zoning request covering nearly 28 agricultural parcels — more than 2,000 acres — has already been approved by the local planning commission. The data center, if it goes up, will sit right next to the Huddleston farm instead of on it. County officials point to hundreds of permanent jobs and over a thousand construction jobs as the payoff. Huddleston isn't moved. "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."

Their standoff is really just one piece of a bigger pattern showing up across rural America. In Saline Township, Michigan, voters rejected an OpenAI-Oracle data center only to see construction start weeks later anyway. Angry town halls are popping up nationwide, and in Texas the fight over cheap land and power has turned into a cross-partisan brawl between Big Tech and farmers and ranchers who'd rather keep their ground than cash a check.