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AI companies are buying land at an increasing rate across the United States for the purpose of building new data centers, yet one farm owner has stood up against the mega corporations and denied an 'insane' offer in the process.
Artificial intelligence can only continue its development to a certain point through advancements purely on the software side of things, as it needs the hardware and supply to keep up with the overwhelming demand.
This is key to Elon Musk's decision to go ahead with a world-leading chip manufacturing factory project costing over $20 billion, and several of the industry's biggest companies including Meta, Google, and OpenAI have been aggressive in building powerful data centers — effectively the 'brain' of their models.
These data centers often take up a lot of space, however, and have a significant impact on the surrounding area to the point where several nearby residents have lodged significant complaints and even face a risk to their health.
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Not all the land that they opt to take over is vacant too, and some people can be more resilient that they might expect, no matter how many ridiculous financial offers they send their way.
As reported by Local 12 WKRC-12, this is exactly what happened when one AI company tried to buy around half of Ida Huddleston's 1,200-acre farmland just outside of Maysville, Kentucky.
She claims that she received an offer of $26 million from an unnamed company for the property – roughly ten times the going rate for the area – purely because they don't want to give up the farmland and see it replaced by a data center.
"It's my way, I'll stay at home and feed the nation," one member of Huddleston's family remarked, explaining her reasoning for rejecting the mind-blowing offer. "$26 million doesn't mean anything," she continued, emphasizing the importance of the land that had remained in the family for decades.
"They call us old stupid farmers, you know, but we're not," Huddleston added. "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."
She also cast doubt on claims that the data center would benefit the economy of the local area, calling the project a 'scam', although the unnamed company in question could still build a data center next to her farm after revising its plans and filing a new zoning request, as per TechCrunch.
