Woman reveals why her family is turning down $26,000,000 offer to turn Kentucky farm into data center

A woman in Kentucky has explained why she and her farming family won’t be selling their property to tech giants to create a huge data center.

A number of large tech companies have been rapidly building data centers, in a bid to keep up with demand.

Companies have been snapping up land across the US to build these centers on, often offering landowners big money. 

However, one family in Kentucky declined an offer of $26 million for their land, and have vowed to stay put instead.

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An unnamed company was happy to splash the cash to build a data center, but the family refused

Ida Huddleston comes from a long line of farmers in Northern Kentucky, and say the land has provided her with ‘anything and everything’ she’s needed for the last 82 years.

In May last year, two men knocked at the farm door and said they were reaching out on behalf of their ‘Fortune 100’ AI company client. 

The unnamed client wanted to purchase the farmland from Huddleston, and they were willing to offer a lot more than the land was worth. 

Huddleston told WKRC that land in the local area was valued at around $6,000, but the mystery client offered her ten times that amount, a total of $26 million. 

But despite the impressive sum being offered, it was an easy decision for Huddleston. 

“You don’t have enough to buy me out. I’m not for sale. Leave me alone, I’m satisfied,” she told the men, according to the Guardian. 

Huddleston’s daughter Delsia Bare backed her mom’s comments, saying that ‘$26 million doesn’t mean anything’, and that the family would much prefer to ‘hold and feed a nation’. 

“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,” Bare told WKRC.

“Even raised wheat through the Depression and kept bread lines up in the United States of America when people didn’t have anything else.”

They’re not only ones refusing to sell their land

Huddleston and her family aren’t the only farmers who are turning down huge sums of money from tech giants. 

One of her neighbors, Dr Timothy Grosser, 75, also rejected an offer on his land. 

He told the Guardian he was initially offered $8 million for his 250-acre farm, but turned it down, after which the developers returned and asked him to ‘name his price’. 

But he held firm, telling the company: “There is none.” 

And it isn’t just in Kentucky where farmers are pushing back on data centers. 

In January, a Pennsylvania farmer said no to a $15 million offer for his land, while another in Wisconsin turned down a whopping $80 million to sell up. 

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